The home lawn remains as an ongoing standard landscaping feature in many home backyards and front yards, the home lawn today continues its reign over decades and even many hundreds of years past into our modern times. It is without doubt that when many of us buy new homes and we seek to renovate or establish our yards that planning goes into just where the lawn areas will go and which plants will we decide to surround our lawns. The question we seek to address as a possible elephant in the room in modern Australian homes is whether it might be time for many of us to consider not putting down new lawn at all, to possibly remove existing lawns, and to rethink how we use our yards as our future unfolds before us in a very different way from the past.
Australia Has Changed, Permanently
Let’s face it, the days of the Sunday family roast, dad mowing the lawns on the weekend, lots of children playing in their yards and visiting friends to play in their yards, the eerily quiet weekends when the nation rested from its week of labour, the quarter acre block, leaving our doors unlocked when we went out for the day… is all gone forever. Everything we cherished as precious for hundreds and thousands of years into our past lands and into our new land is often now called ‘toxic’.
Today, there’s a stark reduction in children, our families are often broken, for many of us our yards have been taken from us, what remains of family is often disassociated from one another, our weeks are filled with long hours of work, our weekends are filled with long hours of work or shopping, our once quiet weekend streets are a mad rush of everyone running around doing everything imaginable.
Our people have changed.
Our lives have changed.
Our homes have changed.
With all these things in mind, and when we look around at the homes around us as we drive around our cities and towns, these changes are showing in our yards.
For those of us who still have lawns and gardens we often hire lawn mowing contractors and gardeners to take care of our yard work for us, we’re just too busy, too overwhelmed with this modern life and all its demands, we’re just too exhausted, it’s all too much.
For others of us who still have lawns, or which may be better described these days as grassed areas and not lawns at all, and who have no desire whatsoever to keep them in order, or who may be so financially stressed in this modern land that they cannot afford the ongoing maintenance and upkeep, this change of mindset amongst us is showing. Many verges and even front yards and backyards are often being left to grow wild, perhaps being mowed once or twice a year so as to prevent any possible council sanctions, as these grassed areas now grown three or even four feet high before being mowed.
Is It Time To Rethink The Home Lawn
It would seem that for many of us these such unkempt lawns or grassed areas would be better off not existing at all, if permanently being in a state of almost never being maintained at all, they are an eyesore for our homes and our neighbours and for our towns and cities, these areas grow and spread weeds to our neighbours lawns who do maintain their turfed areas, and there is nothing good which can be said about such areas at all.
For those of us with smaller yards we need to consider whether we should plant a lawn at all if it’s never going to be used by us. If all we’re after is a landscaping appearance then other and better options to plant a garden or to install other garden utilities might be a better option. Instead of instantly reaching for an instant lawn, perhaps we need to carefully consider if that’s what we really want and if that option is best suited to our needs, while keeping in mind the ongoing maintenance costs associated with lawn ownership in our modern Australia.
For those of us with just verges these days and no lawns and no gardens at all, then we too have a responsibility to ourselves and to our neighbours to keep these verges in good order, as well as not to contribute to spreading weeds or disease onto our neighbours lawns. Instead of planting a new lawn that we really don’t want to maintain, or instead of keeping wild grasses and weeds growing to five feet high and then calling ten different mowing contractors once a year to look for the cheapest price to slash this overgrown mess, perhaps it’s time to remove that grass and those weeds, permanently.
Options Other Than Lawns
For large backyards, we might be better off extending our garden areas, installing a gazebo with a paved area surrounding it, a koi fish pond perhaps, or even better how about a small vegetable patch and some fruit trees. We could erect a new larger shed to take care of some new hobbies like preserving those fresh fruit and vegetables from our garden, or brewing our beer, or handcrafting clocks, or building German model train sets, or whatever it might be that could take our interest and bring some enthusiasm into our hectic modern lives.
For verges, for smaller yards, or for larger garden areas, the real modern art of gardening is the humble wood-chip! Everyone everywhere appears to be catching onto this new trend, which brings with it so many benefits. Many councils today will offer free wood chips to homes, and wood chips can be planted out in all garden areas around the home. Verges can often be seen now with just wood chips alone instead of lawns, making the area suitable to park cars on. Other verges have a combination of wood chips and a few native plants, having a no to low maintenance garden while keeping our homes in good order. Wood chips will break down slowly over time, so pile them up and don’t be shy, lay them down a foot high if you want, and eventually every so often we can bring some new wood chips in and refresh our gardens once more.
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