So-Slow Book Club, week 5: in defense of an un-manicured yard

“Year by year, the creatures who share this yard have been teaching me the value of an untidy garden.”

Join us in reading The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl in a low-pressure, year-long book club. This post is free to read, but commenting is for paid subscribers only - upgrade your membership to join in the conversation!

I’ve never been very good at lawn care. By that, I mean the neat-and-tidy, mow-and-edge style demanded by HOAs and expected in neighborhoods everywhere.

Lawns have an interesting history; they were once only for well-to-do landowners and acted as a conspicuous display of wealth—who else had the leisure time and labor on hand to keep a manicured yard full of ultimately useless short grass, after all?—but over time, as with so many things, the care and upkeep of yards has become a decidedly middle-class pursuit…though one could argue that much of today’s “middle class” doesn’t really have the time or money for it, either.

But long before I understood the annoyance of an early morning’s peace being wrecked by the loud buzzing of mowers, even longer before I understood how much pollution gas-powered lawnmowers emit, I never cared much for yards.

Grass can be nice in small quantities, but it’s not very interesting, is it? I prefer clover, and tall grasses, and unruly tangles of wildflowers. When I finally learned, as an adult well into my 30s, that there was a movement that argued against the raking and bagging leaves, I felt a spark of vindication: somewhere, down deep, that annual activity had always felt like a waste of time as well as a wasteful loss of something beautiful and rich from the late-autumn landscape.

I didn’t yet fully understand the benefits of leaf cover; only that it made sense to me on an intuitive level to leave it be.

But while I don’t love manicured grass yards or the care they entailed, that hasn’t meant I’ve been exempt from keeping them to the community’s standard. Most of my life I’ve lived in towns and cities where letting the grass grow too long will earn you a fine and a “sign of shame” posted in the yard.

I’ve been the red-faced recipient of the sign—and the fine—more than once.

I live outside the city limits now, away from the scrutiny of municipal officials who may be driving around looking for unkempt yards to cite.

When my now-husband bought this site over a decade ago, he also bought a twenty-acre adjoining lot, left wild and weedy and wildflower-covered, that our living room overlooks.

Deer and turkey roam through the tall grasses, even now sticking out through the snow in some spots; birds dart around the trees overlooking the pond.

To imagine this wild wonderland as tidy, mowed grass - or worse, broken up into multiple manicured yards - hurts my heart.

While we have a small grassy space in the front of the house, most of the time—unless our kindly retired neighbor gets to it with the mower—it’s haphazardly and sporadically trimmed. We’d both rather let it grow, and this year, we’re talking over our options: clover cover, native grasses, let it go and see what happens?

We want to be good neighbors—though our yard is only readily visible from two other homes—but I wonder if our idea of what it means to be a “good neighbor,” when it comes to lawn care anyway, is based on outdated values.

Who decided that cut grass is a virtuous standard, and why do we all feel so compelled to organize our weekends around it?

And anyway, what about our animal neighbors? That was my main takeaway from this chapter of The Comfort of Crows, and I loved both Renkl’s admission of her haphazard garden maintenance as well as the celebration of what all that left-behind organic matter provides the wildlife in her yard.

And of course, this isn’t limited to those of us with acreage; even a tiny yard inside the city limits is teeming with life that could be assisted by leaving things a bit more rough.

As a general rule, we humans don’t pay close attention to the impact we’re having on wildlife until the results of that impact begin to impact us in return.

Fouled air, noise pollution, disappearing bees…at what point will we decide the collective downsides of all this lawn maintenance aren’t worth the upsides? And just who is the “we” who decides, anyway? I certainly can’t blame people for following municipal laws. I know too well the consequences—social and financial—for ignoring them.

For now, I find myself looking for ways to opt out of those socially-imposed “rules” and pay attention to what, as Margaret Renkl puts it, “…the creatures who share this yard have been teaching me the value of an untidy garden.”

Weeds as food for birds and bees, piles full of critters, rotting leaves under feet of snow: all have an important part to play in the world we’re sharing with our wild neighbors.

We may not all be able to eschew the lawn mower, but most of us could create some small oasis in our own outdoor spaces. We just have to be daring - or lazy! - enough to ignore what we’ve been told we “should” do.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this chapter of The Comfort of Crows. Did you feel convicted to leave your outdoor space a bit less manicured, or perhaps, validated in your own sloppy attention to yard work? Or do you see things differently from the author?