How Much Turf Grass Is Enough?

It is and understatement that a well manicured and healthy lawn brings peace and a sense of tranquility, while reducing heat islands and fulfilling needs for carbon and dust sinks.  Large, lush expanses of well manicured Kentucky Blue turf grass takes me back to my childhood, running, rolling and then stopping to rest on this magical carpet while watching the billowing clouds float by overhead.  However, the amount of water and natural resources needed to maintain these lush carpets coupled with the time and financial commitments coupled with potential environmental damages being caused by fertilizers running off into waterways should make all of us ask “how much turf grass is enough for my landscape needs?”

With our changing environmental awareness and changing lifestyles, it makes perfect and financial sense to determine exactly how much manageable turf areas you need and recreate the turf areas you don’t need. 

There are ways to create bio-diverse meadows that will benefit birds and butterflies, in place of those vast acres of single plant turf fields.  We should realize by now that our gardens and landscape are connected to the soul of the gardener or gardeners.  The art does not exist merely within the landscape. Whether it is replacing turf with stepable plants and groundcovers such as creeping potentilla or blue star creeper (see below for further list of turf grass alternative plants) to creating a bird and butterfly habitat filled with evolving seasonal perennials such as penstemons, blue fescues and purple cone flower.  Eliminating existing turf areas is a “one and done” project that will continue to pay forward, and when it is well designed, it will mean less work and more pleasure not to mention the financial savings you will enjoy.

This truly is gardening for the future, it is about building healthy landscapes and lifestyles and it is more than sustainable, it is regenerative.

Other Turf Grass Alternative Plants:

Ajuga reptans (Bugleweed)

Antennaria neglecta (Pussytoes)

Callirhoe involucrata (Purple Winecups)

Fragaria virginiana (Wild Strawberry)

Isotoma fluviatilis (Blue Star Creeper)

Lysimachia nummularia (Creeping Jenny)

Phlox subulata (Creeping Phlox)

Thymus serpyllum (Creeping Thyme)

Trifolium repens (White Clover)

Designing The Perfect Child’s Garden

Without saying, kids love to play in the dirt.  When we were young and few possessions, staying outside all day long was the norm.

Children need the opportunities to be architects and builders, learn about responsibilities and dangers, and the child’s garden is the perfect place for them to carry out these essential and imaginative works.

Elements within the child’s garden can be simple or diverse and should contain areas such as simple sandboxes, earth form play areas such as grass swales and fallen timbers for balance beams.  The child’s garden might contain a backyard habitat equipped with a low flow stream for frog ponds and other interesting creatures.  The urge to seek water and its soothing sounds, such as a meandering stream flowing over a series of small falls, is one of our deepest needs.  Some parents might think that children and water in the garden are a recipe for danger and wish to avoid this element.  With safety clearly addressed, fountains, ponds, streams and pools should be part of this children’s paradise.  Water in the garden can be used as a basic lesson of life, learning to distinguish foolish risk and prudent behavior.

The perfectly designed child’s garden should create a refuge and a place for make believe.  Childhood is the time to create caves and fortresses from found materials.  Willow nests and miniature small space forests create with materials such as bamboo or sumac all serve as safe and mysterious havens for children to develop and explore.

Children are marvelous explorers with their unscathed imagination; they can embark daily into their garden and be greeted by whimsical landscape elements such as a contorted filbert or weeping larch and willows.

Planning for an interactive garden to accompany adults with different bodies and mindsets with children’s outdoor needs is essential.  Children are more flexible, more physical where adults tend to be more cerebral.    Keep in mind a perfect child’s garden will welcome and create satisfying outdoor time for adults and children, close in proximity, not necessarily engaged in the same outdoor room.  Create an adult area that is peaceful and serene yet allows sightlines to the child’s garden and activity areas as children need a place for freedom and a place for privacy as well as adults.

Backyard habitats will allow creatures and children to coexist, equipped with natural bird feeders such as grasses, bushes, vines and trees that produce berries, seeds and nuts.  Children will spend hours in these diverse habitats spying on beautiful winged visitors fluttering about their garden paradise and don’t forget that the perfect child’s garden is equipped with a fitting pet palace or two.

Art in The Garden

When art is incorporated into the landscape, there is nothing ordinary about it.  When a landscape is transformed by art rich with ideas and feeling liberated, it creates a ‘daring’ in all of us.  When a landscape is transformed with art, it is a simpler scene, made up not so much of plants but of shapes (upright, rounded fan), colors that harmonize or contrast with one another (sliver leaf with vivid red), and textures composed by the scale and arrangement of the leaves.  Art within your landscape may come in the form of a trellis or arbor, a meandering decomposed granite walkway contrasting amongst the monochromatic colors of green that surround it.  Vertical and rigid allium bulbs, in all their purple majesty against a backdrop of arched trellises covered in Three-Leaf Akebia (Akebia trifoliate) vine.  The nature of art is to delight and to instruct, and there is no better way than to create delight within your garden with the combination of art and vegetation.

Melding indoor and outdoor space should flow seamlessly together, through glass windows or doors, your gardens should be designed to bring fragrance, flower and foliage into one.  Indoor repose is extended into your garden with cushioned benches and chairs, fitting snugly beneath the overhangs or tucked into a vine covered pergola.  Creating movement and momentum is important, in art and in your garden for you do not want your garden to appear static.  This can be accomplished in many ways, from creating transitional color and texture as plants change from season to season and also by the

infusion of art, in this case a steel trellis with wide swoops, its spirals and tendril directing the eye to the brightly blooming climbing red rose.  People also add movement and momentum in your garden, by simply installing a meandering pathway, humans become the 3-D object and for those that like to keep it simple with clean lines, you could also chooses plants with bold and striking shapes to be the form in the garden, such as planting Roundleaf Alumroot (Heuchera cylindrical), or False Spiraea (Sorbaria sorbifolia) amongst a backdrop of pruned Boxwood (Buxus michrophylla).  Having art as the form in the garden, more than a color or texture for example, can be achieved by keeping your plantings simple, and maintaining your pruning for architectural lines.  You can create form with vertical pieces, such as large cylinder shaped vessels, in which you may not decide to plant anything at all.  In this case, color, texture and flower, the normal language of the garden, are heard as barely a whisper.