I am 100% on board with the no-mow lawn concept. It is completely ironic that we spend tons of money and time on sod and on fertilizer and on sprinkling systems for the sod just to get grass to grow so we can (usually) pay somebody else to come and cut it every week or so all summer long.
I attended the Davidson Horticultural Symposium at Davidson College a couple of weeks ago and most of the speakers this year are proponents of no-mow lawns. In fact one of the afternoon break out sessions was titled “Beautiful No Mow Lawns”. One of the morning speakers, Margie Ruddick, is an award winning landscape architect with international installations and her speech topic was “Wild by Design”. She has a book coming out soon by the same title and her idea is to let what happens just happen. I like that to an extent. Ruddick lost me a bit when she showed slides of her own front yard; it was just a bit scary. She believes that if a weed shows up in her yard it should be nurtured and allowed to thrive there. Her neighbors have called the “weed police” on her several times. So, she is just a bit overly zealous and too much of a purist/naturalist for my taste, but I like the general idea!
Our front yard is pretty well shaded by three large willow oaks, the Quercus phellos, that ubiquitous and iconic tree that epitomizes the streets of older Charlotte neighborhoods. These are the same trees that are aging all together and dropping limbs and entire trees at an alarming rate on unsuspecting heads and cars. For the moment, ours are upright and gorgeous and they pretty well shade the entire front yard. A couple of years ago, I dug up all the grass that wasn’t growing very well anyway under those trees and planted ground cover – Asiatic Jasmine and St. John’s Wort. It has been a slow process; these are not the most energetic ground covers and have been taking forever to fill in the space. Losing patience last summer I added some hostas and ferns around to try to make the space look more lush and not appear as if I had just killed everything because I was too lazy to mow.
That takes care of the front yard; the back yard is a different story. The space between the house and the studio is covered by patio and one side is entirely a planting bed. The area beside the studio behind the garage is the fenced vegetable garden. Our lot is fairly deep for a middle of the city neighborhood and there is actually a good bit of land behind the studio – half is tangled and wooded and makes for great privacy from neighboring houses behind us. The other half is still rather anemic looking grass which I attempt to mow occasionally and hire people to come in and mow when I get tired of it. We jokingly refer to this as the “back 40″.
This is the “Back 40″ in its current state
My new project is to turn all of the back 40 into a meadow-like area covered with wildflowers, thereby eliminating mowing FOREVER on this lot. Just received 2 pounds of wildflower seeds from Eden Brothers Nursery over in Asheville and spread that around. Of course it didn’t go nearly as far as I planned, so I will probably order another pound or so. Another benefit in addition to the no more mowing thing is that the flowers will hopefully attract bees, birds and butterflies. I just hope the birds aren’t attracted until AFTER the flowers grow – fingers are crossed that they don’t pick up all the seed NOW!
More pics to come if colorful blooms start happening back there! Especially if it turns out looking like this:
Which is OF COURSE my vision!
The post No Mo Mowing! appeared first on .