Americans have a love-hate relationship with their lawns. We love it when they look great, but not all of us love the work.

Also, if you dig a little deeper, you see the fault lines around certain kinds of social contracts and American ideas of property value, and social norms that are pretty hotly debated in some quarters.

Recently, we ran across this article by Krystal D’Acosta that talks about the strangeness of putting all that work into lawn care in the first place…

This piece may be a bit over-written. It’s not that there isn’t any reason to have a lawn – but some of the ideas in there are pretty instructive. It reminds us of what we’re doing, and why.

Planning for Nature

One of the biggest takeaways that we had is that property owners tend to forget they are too often directly in conflict with nature.

Nature wants green things to grow. If you don’t want green things to grow, you have to have a deliberate plan and a detailed strategy for maintaining a manicured space. You can’t just wing it – because the force of nature is not a weak one. Without a game plan, nature simply takes over, because nature has a lot more time on its hands than we do!

Building the Happy Medium

When we say that we are an ecologically minded landscaping firm, one of the things that we’re talking about is that kind of deliberate planning.

As a property owner, you don’t have to be in direct conflict with nature all of the time. To the extent that you can engineer a better lawn or outdoor space, you can let nature have its way without having a jungle in your backyard.

How do you do this? It relates to that whole life cycle – from installation and design, to debris removal and re-engineering existing spaces for the next seasons.

If you just look at the website, you’ll see our garden gnomes handling everything in this life cycle – planting and maintaining and cleaning up with an eye toward comprehensive and instructive design.

We feel that’s the way to go, if you want to carefully balance your responsibility as a property owner with your love of nature and your unwillingness to try to dominate natural processes for your own ends.

Talk to us about developing a plan for your property, and you’ll be quite a few steps ahead of the average property owner, in making sure that your lawn has a plan, and a purpose.