Hannah Orloff - Suburban Landscaping

Growing up, my parents always told me that landscaping can be just as important to the value of a suburban home as the house itself. Having a shaven, green lawn bordered by small, symmetrical evergreens and splashes of color from annual flowers makes a property more uniform and enjoyable to look at from the road. Its attractiveness to the human eye allows those passing by to know that the owners are upholding the standards of a well kept home and conforming to the expectations of a suburban homeowner. Americans plant lawns with foreign grasses and maintain them to the societal definition of neat for the ascetics, but what about the practicality? How much water is wasted to keep the grasses green, how many living shrubs are ripped out because of their shape or size, how much gas is released from maintenance and mowing? The amount of time and money that goes into our lawns seems almost ridiculous when you step back for a second: the landscaping outside a house provides nothing to the owner other than acting as a display for other people passing by. It is turned into an ascetically pleasing plot for the human eye, but to all other organisms it essentially becomes a dead space. 

Lawn care in suburban areas becomes less about gardening and more about displays of wealth. Picture driving through a neighborhood and there are two houses next to each other. One house has an immaculate lawn lush with rows of dark and light green and the other one has a barren lawn with crabgrass sprinkled over patches of dry dirt. Not even looking at the conditions of the home or what the interior may appear as you make an assumption. The house with the proper lawn has the time, resources, and/or money to invest in the extra space that is not being used for anything else other than display. Like how bucks grow large antlers to display their genes to does, although having large antlers can decrease their overall survival, the lawn acts as a display of that homeowner's status. Because the homeowner has the ability to invest in that lawn, it creates the illusion to others that they are wealthy and a well kept member of society. For the lawn with no grass, their image becomes constituent with the condition of their lawn, tapered. Even if the inside of the house is immaculate, to the person passing by they some off as "unfit" to live in the home they do. The market value of the house could even go down when it comes time to sell. What may be causing their lawn trouble could be linked to attempting to plant grass that can't survive in the pH of the soil or the type (sandy, rocky, loamy, etc). A simple solution that could be fixed by growing a different variety or even better, native ground plants, but instead the lawn is left barren. Whether the lawn is covered in lush Bermuda grass or dirt, it still holds about the same value to the local organisms in that area, it is essentially a dead zone for biodiversity. Most people would question why they should care about local biodiversity until the natural landscapes around them disappear and the organisms found within them like the cute rabbits and deer or delicious fruits like blueberries and blackberries. For home vegetable gardens a lack of pollinator insects or birds means less yield as well. Putting aside these aspects, planting native grasses and shrubs would also be cheaper to maintenance because it is their environment, they maintenance themselves. It makes more sense to utilize native varieties in landscaping because it would make it cheaper to maintain, but it can also be done in a way that conforms to the societal structure of a lawn, if that is what the homeowner still wants. There is a way to coexist both parties, although planting more native varieties should be considered if the homeowner wants to save money and help the local environment.