The End of the Green Lawn
Earlier this spring, my next door neighbors finally gave up on trying to maintain their lawn on the side of their house. They had the ground covered with a plastic weed barrier and then dumped a ton or so of gravel and rocks on it. It looks awful. But now they don’t have to do anything to maintain it, but that is what they are and I can’t do anything about it.
The official start of summer is a few days away and we have been enduring a nasty heat spell with record breaking temperatures already. It also looks to last a long time, say until next fall. There is also a full-on drought happening this year as well with already low reservoirs and limited recreational opportunities therein. We have to cut back on watering our lawns now to twice a week, and there is a state snitch website that you can turn in your neighbors for overwatering or wasteful watering. In southern Utah they are starting to offer people money to dig up their water wasteful lawns and newly built housing is not required to have anything resembling a lawn now.
I live in an area with a Home Owners Association, (HOA), and my neighbor doesn’t. So I have to maintain the required green lawn and they do not. If higher temperatures, less rain and lower snowfall continue, then the HOA may have to change the requirements for us. It now occurs to me that my lazy neighbors have inadvertently tied into the next trend in our climate stressed world, the elimination of the water-hungry green suburban lawn. The signs were there for all to see, it just took a long-term drought here in the West to smack us in the head with the reality of it. We have lived on luck and just enough water in the past to ignore the problems lurking in the future. But, surprise! The future eventually gets here and if you’re not ready for it, things can get a little painful. And unfortunately, the pain looks like it’s just getting started.
(I have labored long and hard on growing my verdant lawn and landscaping as you can see in this photo that I took this morning. I would be unhappy to have to give it all up and plant cactus and scraggly drought tolerant shrubs. But I may not have much choice in our hotter and dryer future.)
