Decades later, when we bought our house, I thought wanted a yard like a city park, with lots of grass and some tulips in beds by the fence. I was wrong.
When I was a kid I lived in the country. When I ran out the door I was in a rural land that, although not wild, was still full of spirit. Fields grew tall with Queen Anne's Lace, milkweed, and waist high grass. Salt water crept up the creeks at high tide, and the marshes drained to the Atlantic when the tide went out. When I was a kid, I saw more birds and butterflies than I do today.
Decades later, when we bought our house, I thought wanted a yard like a city park, with lots of grass and some tulips in beds by the fence. I was wrong.
The house we bought did have a grass lawn in the back yard. Luckily, within a year, all the grass died.
The former owners, getting ready to sell, must have laid a quick layer of sod over the heavy clay soil. The sod lived long enough for us to buy the house, but it never took root. Bugs burrowed between the sod and the clay, and they ate our grass from the bottom up. We didn't even know they were there until the grass turned brown, over the course of a few weeks. That winter we had a yard of wet, slippery clay.
As I gazed at the repulsive slopyard out back, I became bitter about grass. We would need to dig out several inches of native clay and buy top soil, then reseed or resod. If all went well, I'd be fertilizing, watering, picking weeds, and mowing grass again by next fall.
The best case didn't sound very appealing to me.
A Mediterranean-style garden doesn't include grass. Perennial beds of lavender, pathways of thyme, slopes of rosemary replace the uniform green lawn. Walks paved with pebbles or gravel curve in an unfocused way through the space.
Our backyard is small, too small to waste on grass. With the perennials we see more birds and butterflies than we did with the lawn. The lawnmower sits idley behind the shed, rusting away, rusting away.
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