Lawn Alternative Plantings in Natural Areas and At Home (2025)
Sustainable Landscaping
•
53m
Turfgrass lawns are the number one irrigated crop in North America. While the lawns of our play fields and picnic spaces are valuable, other lawns exist as an unconsidered, socially-default landscape. All these roadsides, corporate campuses, parking lots, and other incidental lawn spaces in our landscapes have the potential to become something more. While converting these lawn spaces into full prairie restorations would be better overall for the environment and potentially better for ecosystem services, this is often not feasible or desired due to safety or aesthetic concerns associated with taller vegetation. Here we propose a “middle ground” of native lawn alternatives– plantings that are short, like lawn, but that deliver ecosystem services over and above those provided by turfgrass.
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