One of my earliest memories from our first house is watching my father struggle with an unpowered lawnmower on a hilly back lawn. Later, in a more level landscape, it became my turn (with my brothers) to manhandle the hand mowers (powered by then) and, when my turn came ’round, ride the riding mower.
This is sheer, grinding drudgery in most environments. In an area where the lawns were often flooded out, it’s even worse. The land around that house had previously been wetland forest. It was transformed into pasture for grazing animals (horses, mostly), and so thoroughly grazed off that my father’s attempts to restore the trees were largely unsuccessful.
When I’m engaged in engaged in drudgery, my natural tendency is to try to develop means whereby the drudgery can be permanently eliminated for everybody. But at the time, I didn’t question why (or even whether) the forest had been replaced by meadows.
Even later, when I discovered that my uncle never mowed one part of his land until the hollyhocks had finished blooming, I didn’t consider the reforesting of the area. This was largely because it wasn’t a forested area. It had originally been long grass prairie, which had been almost entirely replaced by farmland. Trees, in that area, were signs of watercourses, or of present or former habitations. There were no forests to restore, north of the glacial moraine.
It wasn’t really until fairly late that I began reconsidering the near-ubiquitous lawns around houses, campuses, etc. One experience that was decisive was when I was watching one of the rare rainstorms on a college campus. The rain was so heavy that it was very difficult to see across the street. It was so loud that it was very difficult to hear. But while I was enjoying the show, I did hear a click; and looking across the street, I realized that timed irrigation sprinklers had automatically turned on.
After I finished laughing, I started thinking. But I didn’t come to a conclusion, then. That area was also long grass prairie originally. The irrigation was not to make the grass grow, but to keep it from getting brown. But, as my brother later pointed out, why shouldn’t the grass get brown? That’s grasses’ way of surviving dry periods–shut down until the water comes again. Ok, so it’s ugly. Grasses don’t care what they look like. They’re just living their lives. It’s the humans who plant and tend them who care.
It wasn’t really until I moved into another area that had once been heavily forested that I began to realize the hazards of trying to turn all residential areas into shortgrass meadows. To speak fairly, there have always been meadows in that area, But those were alpine meadows, above the timberline. And the grasses used for lawns were almost certainly not imported from the alpine meadows: they’re mostly the standard Bermuda grass.
Even in an area with plentiful rainfall, such meadows of artifice have to be watered in the dry periods if they’re not to turn brown. Because the area is full of steep slopes, they can’t be planted with shortgrass if they’re not graded. Which might help with landslides…except that landfill is very vulnerable in earthquakes. Really the area should not have been deforested in the first place…but it’s too late for that.
Replacing the forested slopes with terraced shortgrass lawns, however, is very far from a good idea. Reforestation is obviously preferable where practicable. Or it would seem that it was obvious. But it’s not pursued in planning.
Some years back, there was a proposal to put in a large park in a downtown area then (and still) largely inhabited by small businesses and small housing buildings (meaning housing for fewer than a hundred people, on average). That area is all landfill, so people shouldn’t really have been living there in an earthquake-prone area, and businesses shouldn’t really have been sited there, either. So replacing it with a park might have been a good idea. But a careful reading of the plans revealed that the park was to be yet another massive meadow, with only two rows of trees to fringe square miles of grasses.
No local plants, in other words. Hardly any trees. An artificial flatland, created largely by disassembling local hills and dumping the dirt into a bay…to be converted into yet another water meadow. This is supposed to be good planning?
There are areas where shortgrass meadows are appropriate landscaping. By and large, these are areas that were already shortgrass prairies when humans first arrived–or sometimes they have become so through progressive desiccation. In other places, ‘lawns’ are not a good idea. In some places these lawns are being removed, and replaced with local vegetation. But not enough.
On a related question that’s not as easy to find information on, I have to wonder how ‘drought’ is defined in areas with differential normal precipitation. ‘Drought’, after all, would mean something different in a desert than on a mountain slope on the windward side of a coastal mountain range. A difference of a few inches of rain/snow might have a substantial impact in both areas: but if there’s a standardized definition which assumes that every area has the same average precipitation, these sorts of differences might be overlooked. I began wondering this while looking at drought maps. The area I was living in, while well below normal precipitation, was NOT included in the areas of drought. So what definition is used? And how is it varied based on regional differences?
treraia 