National Post (National Edition)
Peak grass: the sun may be setting on the manicured lawn.
As lots get smaller, water gets scarcer and free time gets rarer, our grass fetish begins to fade
This week, water officials in the B.C. capital of Victoria issued the striking news that, for the first time ever, more than half of residents did not bother to water their lawns in 2012.
It was especially notable for the City of Gardens, a winter-free land that meticulously counts its flowers every spring (762,742,426, as per last count) and whose main tourist attraction is a Disneyland-style floral display garden.
Regardless, while they may worship flowers and shrubbery, Victorians appear content to watch their lawn cover wither and die during the summer months. As Nils Jensen — the mayor of Oak Bay, greater Victoria’s most horticulture-obsessed municipality — put it to the Times Colonist newspaper: “We’re a city of gardens but not necessarily a city of lawns.”
Plagued by water shortages, pesticide bans and new, more terrifying yard pests — not to mention a modern unwillingness to schlep around a lawnmower — an increasing number of Canadians are throwing in the towel on grass lawns.
After decades of dutifully maintaining some of the world’s trimmest, most sprawling lawns, Canada has reached peak grass.
Facing off against the draconian lawn controls of uncaring city councils, hardcore greenthumbs are opting to plant vegetables and wildflowers where Kentucky Bluegrass once stood. Disinterested suburbanites, meanwhile, are swapping out their labour-intensive yards with brickwork, laneway houses, or even nylon grass.
“It’s like a peace of mind sets in when we’re done, it’s a very rewarding industry to be involved in,” said Mike Holdenried, vice-president of sales for SYNlawn, a Kelowna-based maker of synthetic grasses.
Offering a nylon product that is “not your grandpa’s lime green Astroturf,” Mr. Holdenried says his main demographic is rich, white-collar folks who don’t have the time to mow and are not interested in recruiting teams of landscapers to do it for them. Also, pet owners. “We’ve seen a lot of dog owners throw up their hands and say ‘I just need something that works better,’ ’’ he said.
Although the company’s share of urban acreage remains admittedly slight (SYNlawn does 8,000 to 10,000 installations a year across Canada), the fake-grass sector is growing fast enough to raise the attention of lawn retailers — and spook turf industry competitors.
Home Depot, for one, has noted a rise in grass haters, or at least those looking for “im- mediate results,” said Home Depot live goods merchant Sylvain Larouche. GardenWorks, a B.C. garden centre chain, also gave nylon grasses its blessing, saying it “rivals traditional grass in looks, feel and resiliency,” according to GardenWorks chief operating officer Leanne Johnson.
“Our business as a landscape sector struggles, but plastic plants are talking about record sales growth,” said Alan White, president of Turf Systems, an Ontario lawn care and irrigation company.
The North American lawn has always been a bit of a cultural anomaly. Much of the world’s population, if they live in houses at all, is content to surround dwellings with packed dirt, moss or weeds. Indeed, that was the case in colonial Canada. At the time, patches of close-cut green grass were rare symbols of wealth reserved for the likes of European royalty.
By the 20th century, however, technology had placed the lawn within reach of the common citizen. Armed with gas-powered push-mowers and high-tech offerings of chemical pesticides, Canada’s newly suburbanized citizenry eagerly installed themselves in neighbourhoods of grasscovered mini-estates.
Urban planners, in turn, fetishized the lush greenery of grass and conspired to plant it on every roof, median and courtyard in sight.
Lately, though, the thirsty, high-maintenance North American lawn has been vilified as a decadent resource sink, waste of time or symbol of neighbourhood conformity. “Turf grass has been beat up pretty good,” said Mr. White.
Many homeowners, such as in Victoria, started looking around for alternatives after they got tired of working around tight municipal water restrictions during summertime water shortages.
Widespread pesticide bans took out another segment of the lawn-owning public, although some desperate holdouts resort to cross-border pesticide smuggling.
“I’m not the only one … there’s a lot of people,” one Brockville, Ont., resident told a CBC camera crew in the parking lot of an upstate New York garden centre at the time, adding that he applies the banned chemicals under cover of darkness to avoid detection.
Still others have decided to swap out their grass for vegetable gardens on the premise that if they are going to take up horticulture as a hobby, they would rather have their work rewarded with a free cucumber or head of lettuce at the end of the season. In many neighbourhoods within sight of downtown Vancouver, for instance, residents have encircled their million-dollar homes with small fiefdoms of tomato patches and miniature cornfields.
Of course, city halls have not always been receptive to this turf-ditching revolution, as Michel Beauchamp and Josée Landry discovered last year when officials in Drummondville, Que., threatened a crackdown when they converted their front yard into a vegetable garden.
“It was all about urban cohesion,” said Ms. Landry. “They didn’t want to find themselves with one house growing potatoes, another growing corn and another growing radishes.”
As the story made the rounds of outraged gardening blogs, the couple were soon hailed worldwide as martyrs of private property rights. Eventually, under overwhelming public pressure, Drummondville overturned the gardening ban.
In 2011, Maleea Acker found herself facing similar sanctions when she seeded her Victoria lawn with local plants to try to convert it into a maintenancefree Garry Oak meadow.
Only after she took her story to the press — and the fire department had dutifully inspected the new plant life — were the “noxious plants” allowed to stay.
After the episode, “person after person came to me with a story of receiving the same kind of letter and then immediately kowtowing and mowing whatever they had grown,” Ms. Acker told the National Post this week. “They didn’t think that they had any choice.”
In the United States, lawn fights have begun to inspire militancy among the country’s gardening class. In 2008, a 66-year-old man just north of Tampa, Fla., was jailed for failing to re-sod his browned lawn. Three years later, a 93day sentence similarly loomed over Michigan woman Julie Bass after she was charged with a misdemeanour for installing raised gardening beds in her front yard.
In Texas, so many homeowner associations were resisting citizen efforts to phase out their lawns that in March the state legislature had to pass a law explicitly protecting citizens in the arid state who wanted to convert their yards into something more drought-appropriate.
“It’s about personal property rights,” State Senator Kirk Watson testified before a senate committee in March.
Of course, the lawn will never be fully stricken from Canadian cities and remains “a mainstay of the family landscape,” according to Gardenworks’ Leanne Johnson. As of a 2006 count by Statistics Canada, three-quarters of Canadian households are surrounded by some kind of lawn, and many appear to enjoy the work that comes with it.
Still, the march to degrass rolls on. As urban planner Patrick Condon notes, soon, a majority of Canadians may not even have a choice.
“Pretty much all the growth in housing in pretty much all of Canada’s major cities is on small lots or no lots at all,” said the UBC-based professor of landscape architecture. “Even having an option of a lawn in less and less the case.”