If native plants are so great, why does everyone have lawns?

Lawn watering was already a Texas tradition by the time this photo was taken in Victoria, TX in 1895.”Lorraine Sullivan watering lawn, ca. 1895” from UTSA General Photograph Collection.

The full history of the American lawn has been well documented in many other places, so there is no need for me to rehash that here. But to very briefly summarize, us Americans imported a lot of our ideas about what a cultivated landscape should look like from a miserable island in the North Sea called Great Britain. America was becoming rich at the end of the 19th century, and lawns were a way to bring some fashionable European culture into your suburb. This interest in European gardening ideas came at a time of suburban expansion in the United States, when the new urban middle class suddenly had a lot of land to manage in their new yards. Lawns leapt in the fill the void, and quickly became the signature feature of the American urban landscape. Lawns were conceptually easy to understand, and you didn’t need to be a great landscape garden designer like Capability Brown to create sweeping vistas from your front porch, whether it was in Oak Park, Illinois or Alamo Heights, Texas.

Fast forward to the 21st century and I think it’s fair to say that we should know better by now. It’s well documented that lawns are expensive and ecologically harmful, especially in a place like Texas. There is a burgeoning nursery and landscaping trade catering to the native plant movement. Cities like San Antonio will even pay you to remove your lawn. The pieces are all falling into place for large scale culling of lawns in our state.

So why does lawn culture persist? The short answer that is hard to admit is that people really like it. A lot. And things that people like tend to stick around. And if people like something, they will create a culture and industry to celebrate and enable it. We see this with other harmful practices in our society, like car culture or tobacco culture. Does that mean we should ban cars and tobacco? You would probably be right to say society would be better off, but the backlash to a move like that would negate the benefits. And it’s the same with lawns. Many people genuinely like the tidy appearance of a mowed lawn. They like the outside of their homes to match the insides, just substitute roses for bookshelves and lawns for carpeting. Some people actually enjoy the routine of mowing and watering (I honestly don’t know what my own father would do for fun if he didn’t have a St Augustine lawn to take care of). And it’s become so ingrained in our society, everyone understands at least the rudiments of lawn care: mow, fertilize, water, even if in practice many San Antonio lawns wind up looking more like dirt piles at the end of a long summer.

Pocket prairie in the front yard of a corner lot in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood. What’s stopping you from adding some biodiversity to your home today? If you live in San Antonio or Austin and don’t have an HOA, probably nothing!

There are, of course, lots of rules we’ve created around landscaping that may essentially force you to have a lawn, from HOA regulations to City ordinances. If you live in a place that has heavy handed restrictions like that, my heart goes out to you. But I don’t really view these as the cause of our collective lawn mania, but rather a symptom. If tomorrow our culture decided we valued biodiversity and home food production, what’s written in the rules would suddenly be ignored or changed. There are countless rules on the books that aren’t enforced anymore because our values changed.

We as gardeners could all head up to the Legislature or City Hall and yell until we’re blue in the face about how we want everyone to have vegetable gardens and wildflower meadows, but that isn’t going to get rid of our lawn culture. It’s up to us as citizens of our towns and neighborhoods to lead the way and create the future we want for ourselves today. The more people that do this, the more it becomes normalized, and the more people who realize that it could be option for them too. We are on the leading edge of a revolution in how we think about home landscapes in our state. In my own neighborhood in San Antonio, I sometimes can’t step into my messy front yard vegetable garden without getting a compliment from a passerby. I mention this to brag of course, but also to cite as evidence of a growing awakening of alternative ways of using urban land. People are at least interested and curious about moving past their lawns, and your neighbors might wind up being more supportive than you think.