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Clark County homeowners are going native

More residents are forgoing lawns in favor of more environmentally compatible yards

By Dameon Pesanti, Columbian staff writer
Published: June 10, 2018, 6:03am
11 Photos
Michele Huffman studies a western azalea in a stretch of her backyard in Salmon Creek that was once a fairly typical lawn. Huffman is one of a growing group of property owners who have ripped out their monoculture lawns and replaced them with native plant gardens. “It’s not a showcase-type garden; it’s little messy by design. I want to encourage wildlife and want to encourage birds in our area,” she said.
Michele Huffman studies a western azalea in a stretch of her backyard in Salmon Creek that was once a fairly typical lawn. Huffman is one of a growing group of property owners who have ripped out their monoculture lawns and replaced them with native plant gardens. “It’s not a showcase-type garden; it’s little messy by design. I want to encourage wildlife and want to encourage birds in our area,” she said. Alisha Jucevic/The Columbian Photo Gallery

Vancouver’s — in fact, much of America’s — suburban characteristics owe a lot to the Reconstruction Era predilections of a landscape architect who loathed England’s suburban walled gardens and didn’t much care for flowers, either.

When Fredrick Law Olmsted designed Riverside, Ill., one of America’s first subdivisions, he rejected right angles and front yard fences to define personal fiefdoms. Olmsted’s vision was to create the illusion that residents lived in one giant park, with houses, like islands along meandering sluiceways of lawn, set 30 feet back from the curb and personal properties accentuated by strategically placed shrubs and trees.

While many Southwest Washington residents find themselves living in neighborhoods modeled in Omsted’s Riverside vision, a growing number of them are dropping his city park sensibilities and replacing their lawns with landscapes more fitting to the wild character of the Pacific Northwest. At the same time, a cadre of environmentally focused organizations have begun championing the cause and are working to provide the resources and connections people need when they’re ready to make the switch.

“Probably two-thirds of my clients are interested in either no lawn or a lot less lawn,” said Vanessa Gardner Nagel, a landscape designer based in Clark County. “They’re getting educated, and they’re realizing having a lawn is not the best thing for the environment. I think they’re coming at it from that approach. The word is definitely getting out there.”

Native Plants

Plants native to the Pacific Northwest are naturally adapted to this region’s climate and provide habitat for wildlife. A few examples are:

• Pacific dogwood (medium-sized deciduous tree).

• Oregon grape (fairly short evergreen, flowering shrub).

• Pearly everlasting (perennial).

• Monkey flower (perennial).

• Pacific bleeding heart (perennial).

Nagel said it was something of a radical notion when she decided to rip up her own lawn and replace it with native and ornamental plants about seven years ago. Consumers and landscape designers were getting into the idea and most plant nurseries and landscape contractors were in need of time to build out the inventories and infrastructure to catch up.

Now, she said the idea has taken hold and people are starting to landscape their yards in a way that replicates the way nature would. That typically means planting in layers. Say putting in a native species of shrub or tree, then planting the dirt around it with many short native plants for ground cover, rather than just using bark or bare soil.

But even if more people are going native, America’s infatuation with turf grasses has grown dramatically since Olmsted’s day.

A 2005 NASA study of satellite images concluded just under 2 percent of the continental United States, or 40 million acres, is covered in lawns — nearly half the amount of land devoted to growing corn in the U.S.

Orderly aesthetics and backyard barbecues aside, a lawn does little, if anything, to benefit property owners. In fact, owning one requires a ritualistic tithing of time, money and resources if it’s going to stay presentable.

To keep the grass growing, Americans dump 9 billion gallons of water into their yards every day, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Americans spent $90 per year on lawn care, or $29.1 billion in total in 2015, according to Mintel, a market research company. Once it’s a lawn has grown out, we spend about 70 hours a year mowing it, according to the American Time Use Survey.

While lawns cost people a lot of time and money, they also cause local wildlife to lose out on valuable habitat. What’s more, the chemicals people dump on their lawns to promote growth or keep bugs or disease at bay often wind up going directly into waterways, contributing to high nutrient loads in waterways which can lead to fish-harming algae blooms.

“What makes (a lawn) inhospitable is it doesn’t provide any food or shelter or habitat for wildlife … a lot of insects, beneficial insects, specifically pollinators can live out their entire life cycle on native plants and native grasses,” said Susie Peterson, backyard habitat certification program manager for the Columbia Land Trust. “When (lawn grasses) were created, there wasn’t any thought put into how are beneficial insects going to use these plants, it was what’s going to stay green for a long period of time and provide the softest walking surface.”

To Learn More

To learn more about swapping your yard for native or lower-maintenance plants, visit:

www.thewatershedalliance.org/programs

extension.wsu.edu/clark/master-gardeners/

www.backyardhabitats.org

www.xerces.org

www.naturescaping.org

The Columbia Land Trust Backyard Habitat Certification Program is a partnership with the Portland Audubon Society that works with property owners around Portland to re-create some of the region’s native habitat in their own backyards. In order for a backyard to be certified, a property owner has to remove invasive weeds, plant native plants, manage on-site stormwater, reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides and provide habitat for wildlife.

The program isn’t yet in Clark County, but the organization plans on expanding to this side of the river in the next couple years.

But the Watershed Alliance of Southwest Washington currently offers a handful of programs with similar goals throughout the area.

The organization has a program that sends employees door to door, connecting with homeowners living within 175 feet of Burnt Bridge Creek and urging them to create native plant and wildlife-friendly backyards. The creek has historically struggled with water-quality problems. The native vegetation the Watershed Alliance encourages soak up water better than lawns, and don’t require fertilizers, which together reduce the amount harmful stormwater runoff entering waterway. The employees review the property then give the homeowner a custom report about specific plants they can plant in specific locations to give them the best odds of survival.

“The people we’ve talked to love it,” said Bethany Wray, program coordinator for the Watershed Alliance. “They bought on the creek because they like and want to take care of it but don’t know how.”

Wray said the people they’ve spoken with are open to the idea of taking out their lawns, but typically start out with converting a small portion of their property.

Michele Huffman, who lives in a subdivision north of Salmon Creek, said going from grass to garden has been an ongoing process that’s taken years.

She and her husband live in a neighborhood filled with lots anywhere from 1 to 2.5 acres. Her own property is 1.3 acres, with about a quarter-acre being native Oregon ash trees. They converted about half of their backyard to native plants about seven years ago and have steadily grown the footprint of their perennial beds in the years since.

“We wanted to enhance habitat for wildlife in our area, and wanted to attract birds and pollinators as much as we can,” she said. “There was a practical issue around trying to keep this thing mowed, it was really tough … In the backyard the first place I took out was very, very boggy, so even the mowing was a problem, we couldn’t get in there to do it until June.”

She said her general goal is to have a garden that mostly takes care of itself — filled with plants that don’t require much water beyond the rain — and one that attracts local pollinators and wildlife.

So far it seems to be working.

Nagel, the landscape designer, said dropping a lawn might be desirable for people, but it also requires an education about what plants the land can support, as well as embracing a new aesthetic that doesn’t match the suburban American Dream.

Even if the general public does like dumping the lawn, they might live in a community that doesn’t.

“I have clients that are part of an HOA where they have a developer who hasn’t finished building all the houses yet, so they put in lawns then they tell homeowners you need to keep a lawn until I’m done building, then everyone’s got a lawn and don’t want to take it out,” she said. “Plus HOAs are afraid of property values plummeting so they want everyone’s lawn to look the same.”

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