The Grass Isn’t Greener: Time To Rewild the American Lawn

“In nature, nothing exists alone.” — Rachel Carson

In late spring, I got a text from my landlord: “The lawn will be mowed on Thursday.” I imagine many tenants welcome this kind of update — tidy rows, neat edges, the smell of cut grass in the air. Not me; I felt dread.

Mowing season has arrived.

Across the country, millions of mowers are revving up in suburban garages, rural barns and city parks. Turf is trimmed, weeds are doused in chemicals that send bare feet and pets indoors for days, and yet another season of green conformity begins.

The American lawn, for all its visual polish, is far from benign. In fact, it may be one of the most overlooked environmental liabilities of our time.

We’ve normalized something deeply strange: carving out vast tracts of land, planting a handful of shallow-rooted grasses, and pouring on water, fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides year after year. As turf displaces more ecologically valuable land, it invites a steady parade of pollution, including the two-stroke and four-stroke engines that power the maintenance machines that never seem to rest.

It’s quiet. It’s orderly. It’s catastrophic.

“A weed is just a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lawn is a surprisingly recent feature of the American landscape. Its roots trace back to medieval Europe, where small grassy clearings were used for communal grazing. By the 17th century, lawns took on a more decorative form — walkways and meadows planted with chamomile and clover — eventually evolving into the iconic closely-clipped English lawn: a symbol of wealth and status. These expanses signaled that the landowner could afford not to grow food and work the land.

Capability Brown, an 18th century English landscape designer, designed large parkland views with grass, serpentine lakes, tree clumps and long carriage drives. His style would influence hundreds of gardens across England at that time.

Brown’s work was later criticized for being bland, repetitive and artificial. Humphry Repton, another landscape gardener of the period, initially followed Brown’s style, but later he explored reviving formal flower gardens and terraces near the house while keeping Brown’s approach to the parkland beyond. Repton produced a design for Kenwood, north London, in the 1790s.

It wasn’t until 1830, when Edwin Budding invented the mechanical lawnmower, that lawns became attainable for the middle class. Within roughly a decade, finely trimmed grass wasn’t just for estates and manors. Families across England began sculpting small green replicas in their backyards. America, not far behind on this trend, took to it like no other.

Fast forward to today, and the lawn is now the largest crop in the United States — more than corn, wheat or soybeans. A NASA-led study in 2005 found that there were 50,000 square miles of turf grass in the United States, covering an area nearly the size of Iowa. Two decades later, there’s little doubt that number has grown, yet public data on lawn coverage remains surprisingly scarce.

The quiet spread of this monoculture has been largely unchallenged, sprawling across suburban developments, corporate campuses, golf courses, and public parks with little regard for biodiversity or climate resilience. The biggest issues occur when there are few barriers between lawns — pollinators, birds and countless other species lose essential pathways to nest, hide from predators, forage and rest. Without these key species, we are in deep trouble.

As Paul Robbins writes in “Lawn People,” it’s not just the land that’s consumed, but also our time, energy and identity. “The lawn,” he notes, “receives more care, time and attention from individuals and households than any other natural space.” Here’s the thing: This didn’t happen because people want to destroy vital habitat.

It would be a mistake to shame the average American homeowner, exhausted from a full day at work, just trying to tidy up their yard. Having grown up on the South Fork of Long Island, I can assure you that uber-wealthy estates — often with sweeping acres of excessively fertilized grass — are responsible for even more outsized impacts. From August 1, 2024, to July 31, 2025, one nearly 5-acre oceanfront home in Southampton used 15.83 million gallons of water, more than 100 times as much water as the typical household in Suffolk County.

But even then — are they truly to blame? Is it helpful to think in terms of blame at all?

Lawn culture is upheld by a dense web of social expectations, aesthetic ideals, HOA regulations and profit incentives. Marketed as the pinnacle of beauty, tidiness, affluence and civic pride, the manicured lawn has become an unquestioned standard. But monocultural turfgrass creates ecological dead zones — replacing complex, life-sustaining habitat with a kind of synthetic stillness. And the damage doesn’t stop at the lawn’s edge: runoff laced with fertilizers and pesticides flows into waterways, harming aquatic life and polluting marine ecosystems. Yet nowhere is this loss more devastating than for our pollinators.

I didn’t always know the science, but I felt the problem deeply — even as a teenager.

In high school, I was a quiet kind of eco-vigilante. I used to hand-make anti-pesticide flyers and stuff them into my neighbors’ mailboxes. (Technically illegal. Spiritually righteous.) That same year, I took on a personal restoration project: turning a chunk of lawn at my mom’s rental home into a wildflower meadow.

With the help of a family friend, I tore up the sod and scattered native seeds — bee balm, coneflower, goldenrod, aster. That first summer, I mostly watched foliage unfold, with only a few shy blooms — a typical start for young perennials. By the next spring, the yard erupted in color. I filled field journals, pressed specimens into makeshift herbariums, and began learning the names of the bees who arrived — tiny sweat bees, fuzzy bumblebees, metallic green creatures that hummed like the edge of a song.

My mom, a free spirit who treated “no” like a foreign language, let it slide. Her landlord, however, was not so generous.

The day she came by to inspect the property before we moved out — barely concealing her panic at the “mess” of blossoms — I happened to be the only one home. After a lap around the property, she marched up to the front door, flustered.

“What happened to my yard? This is not what the HOA recommends!” she shouted. (I kid you not.)

I tried to explain: about native plants, biodiversity, the plight of pollinators. I spoke with the fervor of someone freshly out of AP biology and full of purpose. She wasn’t impressed, but the exchange planted something in me: the realization that aesthetic norms can be a kind of ecological violence, and that pushing back — even in a rented backyard — mattered. I was in tears by the time my mom got home. I had just tried (and spectacularly failed) to convince a furious landlord that goldenrod was a gift to mankind.

“To truly know the world, look deeply into the smallest things.” — Rudolf Steiner

These days, it’s common to hear people say they’re “saving the bees.” Often, what they mean is honeybees — Apis mellifera, a domesticated European species. This is an understandable case of misplaced heroism.

While honeybees are crucial to agriculture, they aren’t native to North America. In fact, their proliferation — especially in urban areas — can outcompete native bees for limited floral resources. They’re livestock, not wildlife.

Native bees — like leafcutters, mason bees, digger bees, sweat bees, and the fuzzy, endangered rusty-patched bumblebee — are far more efficient at pollinating many plant species. It’s not a popular opinion, but it would be remiss not to mention that wasps matter too. From paper wasps to parasitic wasps (unsung heroes of natural pest control), many play crucial roles in ecosystems — and even in agriculture. More often than not, these pollinators don’t live in colonies, and certainly don’t produce honey. They nest in the ground, in hollow stems, in the quiet edges of our yards that often get trimmed away.

When we talk about “saving the bees,” we need to broaden our lens. We need to save the spaces where all types of pollinators can live.

So, What Can We Do?

Let’s be clear: Grasses aren’t the enemy. Grasses on rooftops can help cool urban heat islands, regenerative grazing on pastures has been shown to effectively sequester and store carbon (check out Carbon Cowboys), and like most plants, grasses can help slow stormwater runoff and even dampen noise pollution. The issue isn’t grass — it’s what we’ve chosen to grow, how we grow it, and what we’ve excluded to make room for it.

This is the upside of such a widespread problem: It’s easily solvable.

Just 10 square feet of mindfully selected flowering plants can create vital habitat for a host of bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, and beetles. A single patch of goldenrod, bee balm, aster, milkweed, or butterfly weed, can host dozens of species. If you replace even a third of your lawn with wildflower meadows, native shrubs, or no-mow zones, your yard becomes not just beautiful, but an incredibly beneficial ecosystem.

If you have children, dogs, or simply like the feel of grass underfoot — keep some lawn! No one’s asking you to rip it all out. Conservation groups suggest that 1,000 to 2,000 square feet is more than enough space for recreation. (On average, the residential lawn in the United States is approximately 10,000 square feet.) The rest of your yard can work smarter — cooling the soil, building organic matter, absorbing carbon, and feeding pollinators.

It’s not too late to change. With what is at stake, we have to want something better than green conformity.

We need a new American yard — one with room to run, yes, but also room to grow wild. And if it means less mowing, fewer sprinkler repairs, and more time in a hammock, all the better.

I grew up in East Hampton and moved back here full-time in 2023 to work for Cornell Marine Program. I specialized in habitat restoration and oversaw most of our public programming and school curriculum design. As of this June, I’ve branched off to work independently as an ecologically-minded garden designer, focused on public green spaces and related educational programs. I also publish monthly to my Substack newsletter, Field Notes for Growing, at ellagatfield.substack.com.