No Lawn

One of the attractions of this house is that we no longer have a lawn. Pea gravel and paving stones cover the ground all around our home. It's a Santa Fe look that suits the adobe style structures and the intimate, small, fenced-in courtyard areas that are the "yards" in this city.

Surrounded by stone and gravel, front and back (and sides too)

Lawns are just not a sight here. Visually it is coherent and clean looking. It's also environmentally responsible.

I struggled with the idea of a lawn in my New England yard but I could never figure out a way to replace all of it. It framed my beds beautifully -- a gorgeous green carpet when it looked good but raggedy at times when it burned out in summer

With lots of care and effort and inputs our lawn was lush . .  until it wasn't.

Several of my gardener friends were no-lawn advocates and they had lovely gardens in wooded areas with lots of interest and plantings. But I couldn't get there with our open half acre builder's lot in a development. Completely planting up the grass areas seemed even more intensive than I could manage, and adding pavers and non-garden hardscape all around was too expensive.

So we kept a lawn and it was consistent with the lawns up and down the street. It was an established look. Jim mowed, we hired a service to fertilize and control weeds, we watered regularly, and I spent endless hours edging to keep encroaching grass out of my borders, and weeding on hands and knees where the grass had gotten to.

Mower Man. He's lost 30 pounds since we moved to New Mexico.

Grass clippings were mulched into the lawn at times, but during the active growing season it was too much, so Jim bagged the clippings and dumped them in the meadow where they remained in anaerobic mats that did not break down. Ugh.

When hot temperatures hit or in dry times, the grass burned out and looked terrible. It always looked bad near the maple trees, where the big roots took all the moisture and left the grass parched. I had plans to dig out those areas and plant things there, but . . . oof. Too much.

Hot summer temperatures in Connecticut and a broken sprinkler, ack.

So here were are, living in a sea of gravel, rocks, sand and paving stones. We no longer hear mowers roaring all week, our water bill is lower, we don't have to maintain a sprinkler system, pesticides and weed killers are not spread all over, and the physical work effort to maintain the yard is non existent. It's like having the benefit of condo living, without living in a condo.

The only disadvantage is that I have to remove buckets of gravel anywhere I want to stick a plant in the ground or create a garden. But I can do that. And Jim misses riding around on his John Deere mower, which he liked doing on nice days, but his back does not miss the physical work involved in lawn maintenance.

I had to dig out the gravel and amend the soil to add a strip garden along the patio edge here.

An all-gravel, all-hardscape look would have been out of place in Connecticut, although elements of patios and stonework and walls were doable. Here it all looks right.

This corner abutting the neighbor's garage wall will be planted this spring.

But it goes well beyond the look. Having no lawn also has freed us from so much expense and a lot of effort. At our ages we would have eventually had to hire out all the maintenance or move to a condo. I'm glad instead that we ended up in a place where we don't have to make either of those choices.