This Woman Wants to Destroy Your Lawn And replace it with something better

 

https://downeast.com/land-wildlife/this-woman-wants-to-destroy-your-lawn/

 

By Peter Andrey Smith
Photographed by Michael D. Wilson
From our January 2023 issue

-----

The rapid growth of the Wild Seed Project coincided with a broader war on lawns gaining traction across the country. Lawns in the U.S. cover a land mass about the size of Iowa, accounting for as much as half of all residential water consumption and a quarter of the use of several popular herbicides. Gas-powered lawn and garden equipment puts an estimated 20 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, and the emissions footprint of nitrogen-heavy lawn fertilizers is as bad or worse. Across the country, particularly in the parched West, cities and towns have started mandating the removal of turf grass and incentivizing permaculture, and more-naturalistic lawn alternatives have even begun catching on in New England, as the region slogs through years of severe drought.

-----

As the hummingbird flew off, McCargo made the case for sexual plant reproduction, which is something of a lost art in the commercial horticulture trade. The cardinal flower in her garden came from a seed — it’s the so-called “straight species,” meaning the plant evolved from hundreds of years of sexual reproduction. By contrast, most nurseries offer hybrids, crosses between two species; some sell Lobelia with names like Vulcan Red and Starship Deep Rose. Seeds from a hybrid don’t grow true to type, however — that is, they don’t look exactly like their parents — and so breeders rely on forms of asexual (or vegetative) propagation, such as cutting or grafting to ensure they’ll get the same genes and the same ornamental characteristics.

Asexual reproduction creates genetic clones, but McCargo champions sexual reproduction because it perpetuates genetic diversity, potentially giving a species like cardinal flowers a leg up adapting to changing environments. McCargo also points out that while hybrid Lobelia might look the part, they’re a poor imitation — an example of how some cultivars can shortchange pollinators. A researcher she knows from Vermont went out every morning for three years to collect nectar from two groups of Lobelia. She found that the hybrids produced only 20 percent as much nectar as the straight species, suggesting that birds would have to work harder to find food. “So you take a hummingbird, which is already stressed because we ruined their world,” McCargo told me. “Then they find a flower, but it’s like an empty treat.”

The mantra at the heart of McCargo’s mission is that it’s time to rethink what makes landscapes beautiful. If you’re planting based only on aesthetics, she and her WSP colleagues suggest, you’ve overlooked the value to pollinators, to microorganisms in the soil, and to ecological communities — both present and future. McCargo also promotes a new school of ecological thinking about what a “native” plant might be, making room for plants that have had no historical presence but are likely to thrive in landscapes altered by climate change. 

-----