turn your – With U.S. turfgrass covering about 40 million acres, a new approach is gaining momentum: shrink the lawn and replace it with Midwest native plants. The science behind the shift is simple—native gardens support pollinators and other wildlife—while the practical
A lawn is supposed to be easy—soft ground for a picnic, a flat surface for a game. But the version of “easy” most homeowners are living with has a cost that reaches far beyond the yard.
Turfgrass covers an estimated 40 million acres in the United States, roughly the size of the state of Georgia. And every season, gas-powered lawn tools—mowers and trimmers—release air pollutants. The Environmental Protection Agency says those tools put out 30 million tons of air pollutants each year.
Keeping lawns tidy also means weedkillers and fertilizers. When it rains, those chemicals don’t just stay put. They wash into storm drains and make their way to lakes and rivers. Shrinking lawns, advocates say, can reduce those impacts—and it can also make room for gardens designed for wildlife.
That matters at a time when North America has lost one-quarter of its birds and the U.S. has lost one-fifth of its butterflies. University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy has calculated that if Americans reduced their lawns by half and added native plant gardens to feed birds. butterflies and other wildlife. the resulting habitat could be greater than Yellowstone and a dozen other major national parks combined.
The shift doesn’t start with a grand makeover. It starts with a decision to make space.
In a garden near the Kansas City metro area, a once-standard lawn is now filled with Midwest native plants—including Ohio spiderwort and mountain mint that draw pollinators. The visual change is striking, but the method behind it is gradual, and it’s rooted in careful planning.
“You can take on an expansive garden, and it can be overwhelming,” Stacia Stelk says, executive director of Deep Roots KC, a group that teaches the public how and why to plant habitat gardens in the Kansas City region. “As you get more comfortable, there’s always room to expand.”
That advice points to the first step: choose a spot where you’ll kill some grass and start small. Stelk’s group warns that replacing an entire lawn at once can lead to weed, mud and erosion problems, so it requires careful planning and more work.
A fence line or a sidewalk can be a good place to begin. If there’s a tree in your yard, consider a flower bed around it. It’s called a soft landing. After caterpillars finish feeding on a tree’s leaves. flowers and leaf litter can offer a safe place for chrysalises and cocoons—protected from lawnmowers. Those insects then emerge as adult butterflies and moths. Bees, fireflies and other insects also find homes in those spaces.
Once the grass-removal area is chosen, the next work is deciding what belongs there.
Native plants are often framed as the answer to wildlife loss, but the reason is more specific than many people expect: many insects feed on particular native plants, and some won’t use substitutes. Monarch caterpillars, for example, need milkweed. They can’t eat anything else.
Native plants also boost insect populations, which then feed birds, frogs, lizards and other animals. To make that happen in the real world, homeowners are urged to match plants to conditions.
Before buying. note whether the future bed will be in shade or sun and what the ground is like—whether soil is sandy. for instance. or whether an area tends to stay wet. Then find native plant groups for your region. Native plants for Arizona and New York, the guidance says, are completely different.
For Midwesterners, GrowNative.org offers sample flower bed plans and Top 10 lists of plants for different light and soil conditions. Homeowners also need to choose a style, from short groundcovers to cottagecore gardens with big drifts of pastel flowers to hedges along property lines.
And even the most well-intended plan can run into local barriers. Some homeowners associations and city codes restrict tall flowers and grasses in the front yard.
With the location and plant choices in hand, you have to remove the turf.
There are several ways to kill grass. One approach—called solarizing—is described by Deep Roots KC. It uses transparent plastic to kill existing vegetation during the height of summer, offered as a low-labor method.
But it’s far from the only option. Iowa State University provides a guide to other techniques. including covering grass with cardboard to deprive it of sunlight; laying down sheets of clear plastic to block light and rain; renting a sod cutter or using a shovel to dig turf out by hand; or using herbicide.
There isn’t a single “right” method. The best choice depends on outdoor space, how much hands-on time you want to spend, and how long you’re willing to wait for the grass to die. Smothering grass with cardboard can take weeks or months.
If you use plastic or cardboard, there’s usually no need to remove the dead turf once it’s completely dead—unless you see seedheads or grass pieces that could resprout. The dead turf decomposes on its own and adds organic matter to a new garden.
Then comes the purchase problem.
Native plants can be harder to find. Typical garden centers often stock fewer of them, focusing instead on popular ornamentals such as peonies and boxwoods that originally came from other continents.
Native plant and wildlife advocacy groups sometimes post online indexes of native plant nurseries or pop-up events where native plants will be sold. But buying “lots of plants” can still be expensive.
Jeffrey Popp, director of restoration at Anne Arundel Watershed Stewards Academy near Annapolis, Md., offers a strategy for saving money. First, look for sellers that offer plugs—small young plants sold in six-packs or flats.
“You can buy native plant plugs relatively inexpensive,” Popp says. Despite being small, those plugs can grow fast. Some homeowners with native plant gardens also give away seedlings for free or swap plants. Searching Facebook for local groups dedicated to native plants can turn up native plant societies or local chapters of Wild Ones. a group that encourages wildlife friendly gardening.
Planting from seed is another option, but it requires patience. Nurseries like Prairie Moon, a major native plant seller based in Minnesota, publish detailed instructions for how to get each kind of seed to germinate.
After that, the steps become physical: get plants in the ground, then put mulch around them.
There’s no need to add extra garden soil during planting if you’ve picked native plants suited to your soil conditions. Spacing varies depending on the plant, but the goal is practical: space plants so that once they mature, the flower bed is full.
“Plants want to touch each other,” says Paula Diaz, a master gardener in Kansas City. “They don’t want acres of mulch in between them.”
That tighter planting can help homeowners too. Eventually, the approach means you won’t have to replenish mulch as often or pull weeds as much. The trade-off is time: many perennials “sleep. creep. leap”—they may not seem to do much in their first year. grow only a little in their second. and then thrive in their third. Some species can grow faster, but the schedule still tends to test anyone hoping for instant results.
In the early months, the maintenance is straightforward but persistent: keep an eye out for weeds, make sure empty spaces between plants stay mulched, and water while plants develop strong root systems.
If plants are chosen for local conditions, watering shouldn’t be necessary once they mature—except perhaps during serious dry spells.
Winter preparation matters, too. In the winter, don’t cut plants all the way down. Leave at least part of the stems because native bees nest in them. Leave fallen leaves, because butterflies and other critters are overwintering in them.
And then there’s the part that’s harder to schedule: living with what you’ve built.
Diaz says the difference can feel immediate. She has gardened with native plants for more than a decade, and five of her neighbors have followed suit.
“There’s always a bird that’s singing or frogs that are croaking,” she says. “Being able to go outside and just walk around and see life that happened because you planted what you planted — it helps your heart.”
That emotional payoff is the reason the process keeps spreading in communities, even as broader climate action faces political headwinds.
NPR is dedicating a week to stories and conversations about how communities are moving forward on climate solutions despite significant political headwinds. As the federal government halts plans to address climate change. states. cities. regions and neighborhoods are trying to fill the gap by cutting climate pollution and adapting to extreme weather.
Within that larger pressure, shrinking lawns is framed as both a practical climate step and a wildlife one—by reducing pollutant-producing yard equipment use, limiting the runoff from fertilizers and weedkillers, and creating habitat where birds and butterflies can survive.
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust and a reporter for Harvest Public Media. The podcast episode was produced by Sylvie Douglis. This story was edited by Shahla Farzan, Malaka Gharib and Neela Banerjee. The visual editor is CJ Riculan.
And if you’re willing to start small—one fence line, one tree bed—this guide offers a path that turns a familiar chore into something more than maintenance. It becomes a way to let the yard belong to life again.
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