Lawns and Fertilizer in the Post Today

A few months ago I posted a link to Todd Haiman's blog Landscape Design and More.  The subject: lawns. 

I offered my own reservations about an irrational abundance of turfgrass in the landscape, saying restricting lawn use could be for ecological reasons because, "you don't want to use too much fuel for your mower or water for irrigation."  Well, shame on me for not adding excess fertilizer and runoff of chemicals to that list.  I surely know that's another hazard of lawns, but failed to add that in my post.

Perhaps fertilizers are more on the brain these days -- I've been teaching a horticultural science course at the Grad School here in DC and recently lectured on plant nutrition.  I'd like to think I was fairly strident when telling my students to avoid thoughtlessly throwing fertilizer on everything, precisely because it's contributing to the pollution in our waterways. And I'm part of a much larger trend, as evidenced today in the Washington Post.  The piece features a study by the Environment Maryland Policy and Research Center citing lawn fertilizers as one of the major sources of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay and imploring the state to issue mandates limiting their use, similar to restrictions in New York and New Jersey.  The study is countered by the president of the Maryland Turfgrass Council, Vernon Cooper, who offers a quote that is full of bad science: "[turf is] one of the best filters to prevent damage to the bay." He elaborates that it acts as a sponge that filters nutrients from rain runoff and adds. “A weak or thin lawn allows more sediment to be washed in the bay,”  His quotes are theoretically accurate: plant coverage reduces erosion and the loss of topsoil and sediments to nearby waterways.  But turf that is inundated with fertilizers which in turn wash into waterways is far more damaging than "sediment." Grr.

The Lawn in Landscape Design

Check out Todd Haiman's great post today on the evolution of the lawn.  Like most landscape architects today, I try to help clients on establishing their lawn areas as sensibly as possible.  Too often, an estate has a lawn that seems to roll endlessly along hillsides and besides pastures.  These clients, I think, were heavily influenced by Merchant Ivory films like Howard's End. Which in turn were loosely documenting the English Garden landscapes of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton.  Those two, among others, were largely influenced by the picturesque landscapes of Claude Lorraine.


Now, don't get me wrong, a lawn is a wonderful part of any landscape - it provides a place for vista, scale and play.  My only goal is that when a lawn is designed, it's established with sensible boundaries.  Those boundaries can be programmatic (i.e., you simply don't want to mow too much lawn), ecological (you don't want to use too much fuel for your mower or water for irrigation) or physical (because, really: who wants to mow a lawn that is on a 3:1 slope?). 

The lawn in American landscapes is indeed iconic and not at all a bad thing.  But when we look at a picturesque landscape (perhaps, most famously Stowe House in Buckinghamshire), we should temper our reaction to the gorgeous landscape with the knowledge that countless numbers of workers (both animal and human) are hiding behind those copses of trees, waiting to furiously fight back the turf's growth.