Sustainable Lawns (To lawn or not to lawn, that is the question)
by Colleen Fitzpatrick Michelson

One of the biggest “eco-villians” these days is lawn, and the demonizing of this landscape feature does not sit well with Tom Christopher. He suggests that the focus ought to be on gardeners and our practices instead.

“Suppose you fed your children a diet of junk food. Would it be fair to abuse them for becoming obese?” Tom says. “This is just what American gardeners have done to their lawns. We’ve turned the lawn into an eco-villain by planting poorly adapted grass species and gorging them with fertilizers, water and pesticides.”

It’s time to consider lawn and its role in the landscape in a new light, Tom says. In Connecticut, he adds, the news is good: “Turf can be an eminently sustainable, low-maintenance and environmentally friendly landscape treatment.”

How? By planting new cultivars and mixes that can produce attractive, disease- and pest-resistant turf while reducing the need for mowing by 80 percent or more. By selecting a turf that suits our climate and soil. By understanding why organic maintenance doesn’t always translate into sustainability. By following some of the practices that were in place before the era of chemical pesticides. By increasing the biodiversity of our lawns.

“Lawn is overused but it deserves a place in the landscape,” he says. “It definitely needs to be done far more intelligently and used more imaginatively.”

Tom, who serves on the CHS Board of Directors, was born in Rome, Italy, the son of a Time magazine correspondent. He grew up in various locations in New York. After earning his bachelor’s degree in classics from Brown University, he took on a two-year horticultural apprenticeship at the New York Botanical Garden and worked for 10 years as a Columbia University horticulturalist.

He began writing about horticulture, eventually for magazines that included Horticulture, Town and Country and Martha Stewart Living, and for The New York Times. He has written 10 books and was the editor of “The New American Landscape” (Timber Press, 2011). He is writing a book about perennials with Ruth Clausen, his first teacher at the New York Botanical Garden.

Tom has grown increasingly passionate about the impact of global climate change on the landscape. Last year he started a consulting practice in Middletown, Smart Lawn, to help clients build sustainable lawns. He is creating a small demonstration plot of native grasslands on property owned by Wesleyan University.

His own turf portfolio includes a few efforts worthy of admiration for their creativity or seat-of-the-pants imagination. Both involved a small yard in College Station, Texas, where his wife Suzanne, a geologist, was teaching.

One summer the couple filled the space with spicy globe basil. “It stopped traffic” and elicited a few mutterings about “crazy Yankees,” Tom says. But it yielded a lovely “tufted green carpet. And when we got tired of it we made pesto.”

Another season, unbeknownst to the other, Suzanne was planning a barbecue for her colleagues while Tom was planning to redesign the yard. He ripped out the plantings a month before the barbecue, and then had to devise a quick-fix solution. He bought a big sack of fast-growing garden cress seed and planted it in patterns—zigzags, curlicues, lightning bolts. On party night he lit the yard with spotlights and voila, “garden graffiti.”

That’s not everyone’s idea of a lawn, he readily admits. Even so, “you don’t have to do it the bad way. …Why accept (lawn) as a necessary evil? Why not turn it into an asset for the garden? I’d like to enlist folks into rethinking the whole process.”