Master gardener urges lawn alternatives

A certified master gardener and chemist, Betty Sanders has blunt advice to homeowners about lawn care: Reduce your lawn. Don't water it. Stop using herbicides.

Sanders suspects her ideas might ruffle the feathers of professional lawn care companies and garden centers selling herbicides.

"People need to rethink their lawns. Lawns are a 20th-century thing. It's time to move on," she said.

After a career as an industrial chemist, Sanders earned her master gardener certification by attending a 14-week course given by MassHort and then completing a 60-hour internship. Currently serving as vice president of Massachusetts' 150-member Master Gardener Association, she said she gives lectures that "combine my knowledge of gardening and chemistry."

Sanders believes too many homeowners still embrace the outdated notion their lawns should resemble the manicured greens on the course at the Augusta National Golf Club.

She attributes the American obsession with green and grassy lawns to envy of our British cousins going back two centuries.

"We grow our grass the way we do because those grand English estates had great lawns 200 years ago. When Americans got wealthy, they wanted lawns like the English," Sanders said.

To achieve that misguided goal, they waste time and money on practices that damage the environment and prevent them from changing their lawns for the better. Sanders urges homeowners to be skeptical about sales pitches from anyone trying to sell lawn care services or certain nutrients.

"The polite word for much of what's out there is 'marketing.' The other word is 'bull.' The lawn care business is in the business of selling lawn care," she said.

Sanders most radical suggestion is for homeowners to reduce their lawn by two-thirds and replace grass with ground cover and flowering shrubs that require less care and water and look just as good.

As far as she's concerned, the only practical justification for having a full-sized lawn is "having three little kids who need a lawn to play on."

Sanders suggests replacing much of your lawn with different kinds of ground cover including vinca, herbaceous sub-shrubs sometimes called by the English name periwinkle.

Depending on topography and personal preferences, other alternatives she plans to recommend include sweet woodruff, fast-growing white spring flowers or ferns. "In shady areas, ferns make an amazingly hardy ground cover. And they don't droop," she said.

For Sanders, "watering lawns is a horrible waste of water" whether your community is having a drought or is wet as a rain forest.

She considers watering lawns "one of the major culprits" for washing chemicals off lawns and into community water drainage systems where it runs into lakes and rivers providing opportunities for invasive plants like Asian milfoil to grow and choke native plants. "I don't water my lawn," Sanders said. "I'm comfortable with swaths of brown."

In her talk, she'll urge homeowners when they mow their lawns, there's no need to bag the clippings and carry them away because it interrupts a natural cycle of returning valuable nutrients into the soil. Just leave the clippings where they fall from your mower, she said.

And that goes for fallen leaves, too.

"Raking leaves and taking them to the dump is a horrible thing to do," Sanders said. "Our lawn will be thick with leaves. We let them rot which puts nutrients back in the soil."

She considers carrying away leaves and replacing them with artificial nutrients as especially counter-productive.

"It doesn't make any sense," Sanders said. "You'd be taking away nutrients and then putting nutrient back in."

And Sanders plans to caution homeowners again herbicides, or weed killers, advertised to kill specific "target" plants.

She said their main effect is to kill vital micro-organisms in soil which turn soil into dirt.

"The myth of effective herbicides was invented after World War II. Today's herbicides kill clover. Before 1950, every lawn had clover which could take nitrogen out of the air in ways soil could use," said Sanders.

And Sanders is a declared foe of what she calls "hell strips," the grass planted between sidewalks and the street which usually gets damaged from winter road salt and littered with debris. She suggests replacing strips of dirty grass with genistra, a perennial shrub that looks good and requires less care.