Customer Reviews

Requiem for a Lawnmower: And Other Essays on Easy Gardening With Native Plants

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This is a book of short, readable essays about gardening with native plants. Its a how-to manual telling you how NOT to spend your weekends cutting grass. The writer, who lives in Texas, uses native plants of that state to illustrate her points, but its easy enough for people living elsewhere to substitute local species. Because not only does she tell us that lawns are an ecological wasteland, she goes on to show the reader that many of our garden plants are brought in from other countries and other regions. Not only are they unsuited to our local area and prone to die because they are not used to our soil and climate, but they lead us to ignore equally lovely plants that are at home in our region and perfectly suited not only to our climate and soil but also to our local ecology. They have adapted over hundreds of years to feed and shelter our local wildlife.

The writer, a landscape designer, writer and teacher has a crisp style and keeps her essays short and salted with humour. She has an understanding not just of the ecological blind spots of our times, but of how they came to be. She makes her case for greater ecological responsibility convincingly, with the added incentive of ecologically sound gardening being much less work. So why are there so many green deserts in our suburbs?