Lawn care? Taking a pass on grass

John Hackney hasn’t mowed his lawn in 33 years. That’s because he doesn’t have one.

Not a blade of grass.

His two-story, Williamsburg-style Colonial home in Norfolk’s Lakewood neighborhood is surrounded by a tidy sea of pine straw.

It’s peaceful in more ways than one: He’s not fighting the annual summertime dormancy of bluegrass, nor the endless creeping of Bermuda.

He doesn’t fret over lawn fungus or labor over weeds that sprout in the dog days of August.

When his neighbors fire up their lawn mowers and string trimmers and toil noisily away, he doesn’t join the crowd.

Hackney enjoys his pine needles.

He does without lawn fertilizer, insecticide, fungicide, poison and chemicals. Without any lawn at all, he’s a good steward of the many waterways crisscrossing our area.

Well, we can’t all be John Hackney. Nor do we have to.

A lawn can actually serve a very useful purpose, says Susan French, environmental horticulture Extension agent for Virginia Beach.

Grass can prevent runoff, sedimentation and erosion. And it doesn’t have to be bad for the environment. Lawn fans, eager for turf but not the damage that the overuse of fertilizer causes, can fix that by testing the soil and applying the correct amount of fertilizer at the right times of year.

But if a traditional suburban lawn with a fretful irrigation system seems like a terrible waste of time or money or feels like a threat to a nearby lake, river or the Chesapeake Bay, go ahead and shrink it.

In planting lawn alternatives, French suggests going native.

“We try to incorporate native plants not only because they are typically more pest resistant and require typically less fertilization, they provide wildlife habitat,” French said.

It’s not necessary to go strictly by the book and re-create the flora that the Colonists found when they arrived on these shores in the 1600s. But it is a good idea to get our waterways back into the healthy shape they were in then.

Helen Kuhns is education and outreach coordinator at Lynnhaven River NOW, a restoration project begun in 2001 by local citizens determined to reduce pollution of the Lynnhaven River. One of their goals is to reduce nutrients, sediments and chemicals running off lawns into the river.

“One of the things we try to express to folks is to get away from the idea that a lawn is the ideal,” Kuhns said.

Remove a little lawn or a lot. Either way, local waterways benefit.

And, although replacing grass with plants appropriate for our growing zone is more nature-friendly, she says, there is even greater benefit with native plant selections.

“Native plants are better habitat for birds. It supports the bigger picture ecology of your yard and, ultimately, when more and more people do it, of the entire area,” Kuhns said.

In other words, plant things that grow easily here and you’ll have less work, fewer chemicals and more birds, butterflies and interesting creatures.

Expect to enjoy a new look to a garden with less grass and more natives.

“Native plants are a little bigger,” Kuhns said. “You just don’t get that manicured look that you do from a lawn. You can get more of a pasture or woodland look by using some natives.

“The other thing people don’t realize is that getting into native plants doesn’t mean ripping out everything you’ve got and planting only natives. Just plug a few in to whatever you’ve got.”

Instead of laboring over a lawn or lawnlike plants in his garden in Norfolk, Hackney concentrates on his landscaped beds, precisely edged just as if there were a lawn.

In them, he has a mix of plants – both native and not – lush azaleas, camellias, Japanese maples, dogwoods, ferns and hosta.

Pachysandra has knitted together along the foundation plantings of the house, forming a shady mulch over plant roots.

Those lawnless expanses, though, take care of themselves. Whenever it’s time for the pines to shed, needles from overhead drip onto the sound-muffling carpet already in place.

It’s been that way since 1978.

“My wife and I designed this house,” Hackney said. “The pine trees were already here, a full pine thicket. I guess I took down 100 pines in the beginning. I could take down another 30 and never miss them.”

The main reason he never wanted a lawn, he said, is because of those pines. He knew that grass would never grow in all this shade. So he didn’t even try.

And there was the other consideration, forward-thinking for the time Hackney built his house, considering the current concern for rejuvenating our waterways and the trend, back in the ’70s, for surrounding homes with manicured carpets of grass.

“Fertilizer and bug killer, it all goes into the storm drain, and it would kill nature,” he said.

His house in Norfolk is near the Lafayette River, a waterway that, like the Lynnhaven, eventually empties whatever it contains – both good and bad – into the Chesapeake Bay.

He looked out of the windows of his sunroom onto the brown expanse that is his backyard and offered up one more reason he went lawnless, a point that might entice more Saturday morning lawn warriors to join him.

“I didn’t want to be saddled with a lawn,” he said, smiling. “It interfered with my golf.”

Krys Stefansky, (757) 446-2043,

krys.stefansky@pilotonline.com