What has your perfect green lawn done for you lately? Is it really worth the time, effort, and resources you lavish on it? Armed with encouragement, inspiration, and cutting-edge advice from award-winning author Evelyn Hadden, you can liberate yourself at last!
In this ultimate guide to rethinking your yard, Hadden showcases dozens of inspiring, eco-friendly alternatives to that demanding (and dare we say boring?) green turf. Trade your lawn for a lively prairie or replace it with a runoff-reducing rain garden. Swap it for an interactive adventure garden or convert it to a low-maintenance living carpet.
With Beautiful No-Mow Yards, you can transform your lawn into a livable garden and bring nature’s beauty into your life!
Out with the lawn! The decades-old practice of maintaining a boring plot of grass is finally seeing the light of day as homeowners are learning that they are not only labor intensive but bad for the environment as well. There is a fear that the alternatives are expensive and time-consuming but as this book shows, it is not as intimidating as it sounds and there are various types and options to choose from. All types of gardens seem to be covered here – shade, xeric, edible, patios, children’s gardens, meadows and prairies, ponds, etc. Part Two discusses ways to achieve a no-mow garden – how to convert a lawn to a garden, how to design it and how to maintain it. Part three profiles plants that can be used and are arranged by mounding, mat-forming, fill-in and minglers. Each type of garden discussed is illustrated with an actual garden and the story behind it. Most of the gardens profiled seem to be in the Minnesota and midwest areas and none in the Southeast region. Still, the same principles apply and most of the same plants can be used.
THE definitive helpful and inspiring work on reducing lawns. Originally published at GardenRant.comIn the last year or so, we’re hearing that there are better uses for our land than turfgrass, that unless it’s needed for sport or play, you can save on resources and probably your labor, too, by switching to an array of alternatives – meadows, vegetable gardens, native grasses, and so on.All good! Well, mostly good – because that well-intentioned advice isn’t easy to actually implement, without a LOT more information. Which groundcovers? Which native grasses – and native to where, anyway? How much do the alternatives cost, can they be walked on, and how much work does it really take to maintain them?My mixed reviews of much of the lawn-free cheering has me wildly cheering the thoroughly researched and honestly reported definitive book about reducing or eliminating lawns by Evelyn Hadden. Beautiful No-Mow Yards contains exactly the kind of info that’s needed, and its gorgeous photographs (most by Evelyn and the wonderful Saxon Holt, too) are deeply inspirational to anyone looking to make their yards more interesting, more beautiful, and more wildlife-friendly.Readers of GardenRant are no strangers to this subject, but may not be familiar with the author. Well, Evelyn is THE original lawn reformer, having written Shrink Your Lawn and created the Less Lawn website back in 2001. She’s a pioneer whose cause has caught on.What’s in Beautiful No-Mow Yards Photos and stories about gardens sunny and shady, flat and hilly, a “shockingly simple meadow garden”, a “patio for pennies”, rain gardens, edibles, ponds, terraces, hellstrips and more. “Smarter lawns” using fine fescue mixes, carexes, and other low-resource grass types, including where each type works best and what it takes to install and maintain them. Real gardeners and the truth about their attempts to replace their lawns, failures and all. How-to chapters for killing the lawn, designing alternatives, and maintaining them. An illustrated guide to groundcovers by type.It’s a important, beautiful, and superbly written. Great job!
Comments are disabled for this post.