Lawn Alternatives - Fine Gardening
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Collection
All About Growing Sedges
There are people who categorize plants as either workhorses or showboats, but wouldn’t we prefer our workhorses to be showboats, and vice versa? Few plants fit that brief quite so…
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Design
2 Native Sedges to Replace Your Grass Lawn
Reducing or replacing traditional turfgrass lawns with sustainable substitutes is a hot topic in today’s world of ecological gardening. A few species of Carex are uniquely poised to serve as…
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Design
3 Great Lawn-Alternative Design Ideas for the Pacific Northwest
There is nothing quite like a lawn to really set off a planting bed. A frame is created with the grass below and the sky above. I have a dog,…
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Design
Use These Ground Covers as Lawn Substitutes
I think gardens look best when the ground is covered with either lush growth or an appropriate natural mulch to cover barren soil. Full coverage of the soil has the…
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Design
Exploring Native Lawn Alternatives That Thrive in the Mid-Atlantic
Jeff Lorenz and his team at Refugia Design specialize in creating native landscapes in the Philadelphia area. In addition to looking better than turfgrass, the gardens they design also manage…
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How-To
How to Make a More Sustainable Lawn
Patience is the key ingredient when creating sustainable landscapes that include lawns. The “quick and easy” approach—tilling the soil, working in amendments, rolling the soil to create a level base,…
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How-To
Fungi Are a Sign of Soil Health
A great indicator of soil and plant health is the appearance of fungi in a lawn. The fruiting bodies of an important underground community, they often appear in the fall…
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Article
Lawn Alternatives for the Mountain West
If you’ve looked at current drought maps for the Mountain West, you’ve seen a sea of red, orange, and yellow indicating abnormally dry to severe drought conditions across the region.…
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Design
Lawn Problems: Is the Lawn Passé?
Next to invasive plants, lawns have become the most hated thing in gardening. The evidence usually offered against lawns makes sense: They take up too much water, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides...