This weekend I finished digging out my front lawn. It was a lot of work and I am glad it’s done. It’s challenging physical labor and hurts my back since my front core muscles are like, “wait, you want me to do what?” It’s also fairly tedious so I listened to several audio books as I worked. I have now knelt on every square foot of my front yard. I’ve held dozens of earthworms as I plucked as many as I could find from the pieces of sod. I feel a deeper connection to this small bit of land I live on because I’ve spent time with it. Like when you make a new friend and have an opportunity to spend a good chunk of time together. I just spent about thirty hours with the dirt in my yard. While not always fun, in the end, I feel it has been a privilege. My own metaphoric roots have deepened as a result.
Friends and neighbors seem equally impressed and nonplussed with my effort. Several people I’ve talked to have said they’d rather just take care of a lawn than have a bunch of plants to tend. That makes sense to me – our jobs and commutes take us away from our families for too much time a week. Most people, unless they love gardening, don’t want to spend a lot of time keeping up a yard.
There are so many places where you can read about why lawns are damaging to the environment, contributing to water pollution and waste, and the benefits of having food for birds and pollinators instead—I don’t need to repeat that. I’m also not interested in shaming anyone into getting rid of their lawns—though I think it’s important for people to understand the damage of fertilizer, pesticides, and water waste.
As I’m designing my new yard I am thinking about what a strange effort it is to landscape. It’s so easy to approach the effort as though I am curating a gallery or decorating a room – the primary purpose to be attractive, with some practicality thrown in about size, lack of shade, proximity to power lines and pipes. I am finding it surprising, that despite my dedication to improving the yard, how often I need to reorient myself to also considering what will also make a healthy habitat for plants, birds, animals, insects.
As I’ve shoveled out sod, I feel like I have also been trying to dig away at my ideas of what a front yard is “supposed” to look like. Because what might be best for nature, might actually be a bit messier, a bit more wild than what is currently considered acceptable, saleable, etc. It’s a process to change. This first attempt likely won’t be a rebellion of societal expectations, but the changes will still be a step in the right direction. It takes time to undo internalized notions of beauty—whether it’s an unrealistic expectation for our own bodies, or to let go of neatly trimmed shrubs and a velvet lawn. I want for myself, for all of us, to remember and see the natural beauty all around us. I suspect we will be in better harmony with nature when the manicured lawn and sculpted yards to go the way of corsets: ridiculous for the most part, but fun to see every so often.