The Barefoot Gardener Explains Why You Should Say Goodbye to Your Lawn

Westhampton garden designer and naturalist Suzanne Ruggles, aka the Barefoot Gardener, will join staff from the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center at Hampton Bays Library on Wednesday, March 8, to encourage homeowners to do away with their lawns in favor of native plants that promote biodiversity and a vibrant ecosystem.

It’s a message that Ruggles has been spreading for some time, and it’s what she practices at her own home, which she said in an interview last week is a National Wildlife Federation Certified Wildlife Habitat.

This time around, the presentation is titled “Goodbye Lawn, Hello Biodiversity.”

“The lecture that I give, which is normally titled ‘The Tyranny of Landscaping,’ is about how the common Hamptons landscaping practices are detrimental to the soil, the air, the water, and thus all wildlife and insects and pollinators,” she said.

She said the antidote to the environmental damage is to revegetate with native plants that nurture “all the things we need to survive.”

“When we do native landscapes, we’re actually helping ourselves and all other native life forms in the process of that,” Ruggles said.

She touted the benefits of enhancing biodiversity — all the flora and fauna that exists in a given area. “We need each other,” she said, noting that, for example, opossums eat ticks, and swallows, bats and dragonflies eat mosquitoes. She said beneficial creatures have been replaced by chemical pesticides, which kill the helpful creatures as they kill pests.

Native plants can also be important for nesting animals.

“The cinnamon fern, hummingbirds use that so-called cinnamon to line their nests to keep mites away from their babies,” Ruggles said. “There’s just so many examples of how we’re all interconnected, and when we use chemicals to kill one creature, we’re upsetting the balance, actually affecting ourselves.”

Though she has lost count, she said she has delivered this talk more than 200 times to schools, civic organizations, garden clubs and environmental organizations. She’s also appeared on television and radio to discuss the topic and has published articles.

“Basically, I do whatever I can in my small way for nature,” she said.

Ruggles has been going by the Barefoot Gardener for about 35 years.

“I was working for a garden center, and I was managing a crew for them — and I never had shoes on,” she recalled. “So one of the crew members said, ‘If you ever have your own business, you should call it the Barefoot Gardener.’”

She took that advice.

Her business includes garden design, installation and maintenance.

“I don’t like to call myself a landscaper, because people conjure up images of, like, the mow-and-blow paradigm,” she said. “I like to call it ‘ecosystem restoration,’ because we take out lawns and we put the native plants back — whatever native plant is appropriate to the site, whether it’s maritime system or woodland system or grassland system. We plant the native plants, and then people get to enjoy not only the plants and the flowers but the turtles and the birds and butterflies and hummingbirds and everything else that has coevolved with those plants.”

“Coevolve” is one of the key concepts for understanding the native plant movement. What it comes down to is that animals, from the smallest insects to the largest mammals, evolved in concert with the plants that they eat or that their food sources eat. When the plants they rely on are replaced with turf grasses or nonnative shrubs and trees, they struggle to survive.

Habitat destruction and a lack of native plants are among the reasons researchers give for a sharp decline in bird and insect populations in North America in recent decades.

“When I started in business, I wasn’t really aware of the native plant paradigm,” Ruggles said. “But then I began volunteering at the wildlife rescue center, and I eventually became a member of the board of directors. And I rescued thousands of animals — I was the rescuer and rehabilitator — and realized that … 90 percent of the animals that come into the wildlife center hospital are affected by our landscape practices, whether it’s destruction of their habitat, or pesticide poisoning or a chainsaw or lawn mower, some weed whacker damages them. So I started to look into a better way to landscape and do gardening, and native plants is the obvious answer.”

She noted that many people make a living mowing and blowing lawns but said that taking out lawns and restoring ecosystems is also a lot of work.

“How about this kind of work?” she asked. “Can we undertake this together to save our ecosystem?”

She was challenged once when she gave her talk at the Nature Lyceum in Westhampton. A guest insisted that a study showed that lawns prevent soil erosion better than anything. However, when she looked up the study herself, it did not compare lawns to native meadows — the study only compared lawns to asphalt and bare soil.

The fact is that lawns are a resource-squandering, outdated idea, according to Ruggles. Meanwhile, she said, The New York Times called revegetating with native plants “the avant garde” in landscaping.

“It’s really something that everyone can do on their own land, to give back to nature, the nature that we’re systematically destroying day by day with bulldozers and pesticides and overfertilization and all the other things that this landscape paradigm has required,” she said. “Native plants belong here, and they belong in this weather in the soil. So it’s not that they don’t require any maintenance, but they don’t require copious amounts of water or fertilizer in order to thrive here.”

She said that native plants need watering until they are established. After that, they should be accustomed to local conditions and rainfall and not need supplemental irrigation.

“But also we have to take climate change into consideration,” she added. “We’ve been having a lot of droughts, so I wouldn’t say that they need no water, but they certainly don’t need as much as trees, shrubs and flowers from other lands would need.”

On her personal Certified Wildlife Habitat, she has experienced the difference native plants make. “I have snakes and turtles and chipmunks and every kind of songbird you could name and mammals, and it’s just teeming with life, my own yard,” she said. “So I like to think of myself as the Jane Goodall of suburbia.”

She said she knows that is a little bit hubristic to say but that she feels her property is one of the only places the animals have in the suburban landscape to live.

“I haven’t raked my leaves in 25 years of being here, and that’s why I have turtles, and that’s one of the reasons why I have so much wildlife here,” she said. “And to me, they’re just as beautiful as a flower or a tree from China. It’s really a joy to experience the wildlife — the hummingbirds, the dragonflies, the butterflies.”

She and a film editor are in the process of finishing a documentary called “One Enchanted Acre” about her property, set to debut at the Dandelion Festival in Southold on April 30. “That’s just an attempt to show people what they could have if they gave up part of their lawn or all of their lawn,” she said of the film.

“In the end, the answer is restoring the ecosystem with native plants in whatever little way people can do that, or big way,” Ruggles said. “It all adds up.”

Suzanne Ruggles and the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center will present “Goodbye Lawn, Hello Biodiversity” on Wednesday, March 8, at 7 p.m. at Hampton Bays Public Library. To register, email dvalle@hamptonbayslibrary.org, call 631-728-6241 or visit hamptonbays.librarycalendar.com.