Lawn Free—Free to Make Choices

How free are you? Don’t ask your local code enforcer into your landscape or you may have a few surprises about how free you are to grow and maintain your property. Recent news reports find many homeowners around the country fighting back when their city came knocking at their doors to condemn their landscape. A little old lady from Orem, Utah; a native plant expert in Toronto, Canada; a Xeriscape contest winner in Arvada, Colorado; a conscientious gardener from Buffalo, New York and a conservationist from Tempe, Arizona are just a few to receive summons for their gardening habits. Whether these are predicated on local zoning ordinances that are meant to protect the health and safety of a city slicker or a homeowner’s association’s attempt to maintain property values in a suburban sub-division there are plenty of rules on the books that discourage a gardener from straying away from a pristine lawn.

Many years ago the city of Denver decided to review their six-inch rule for lawns when a homeowner was reported for having a turf that exceeded the height allowance for vegetation. The homeowner was a landscape architect that specialized in Xeriscapes. The rule was intended to keep vacant property and neglected lawns from becoming a health hazard, but the argument that rats will infest a native, unmowed grass lawn is pretty hyperbolic. In this case the offending botanical species was Blue Gramma Grass mixed with a few shrubs and some native wildflowers, with the grass measuring up to an astounding 11 inches. Luckily the ordinance was eventually changed and now provides enough ambiguity to allow for non-traditional landscapes. A new ordinance was adopted in 2002 that also prohibited covenants that require turf grass—the only problem is they didn’t make it retroactive.

What led to Denver’s change of heart? Representatives from the city, the water department, Colorado State University and the green industry came together to craft a regulation that was mindful of dwindling resources and individual expression. Gardening is an art form, after all, and we should have the right to express our personal relationship with nature even when it is beyond the accepted norm. Some of the guiding principles that directed the group:

• Health and safety are important—but within reason. Rats need a food source, but long grass is generally not their preferred diet. Fire safety is important, but the likelihood of the lawn going up in smoke because it is 12 inches tall is nil. You can’t regulate everything out of existence so banning toxic plants would be a nightmare for the inspectors working in the field. Too many landscape plants are considered toxic in varying degrees and requiring inspectors to identify plants in the field is onerous—as is mandating an approved plant list.

• People are individuals and diversity is a positive attribute. This one seems contentious for the traditional landscape adherents, but it has been proven that monocultures—in more than one sense—are prone to ill health. Homeowners associations across the country have tried to reduce communities to a limited palette of style, color and substance in the name of property rights. Biodiversity offers variety and interest.

• In order to protect against scofflaws, a property should provide ‘evidence of care’. Whether this is accomplished by maintaining a mowed strip around the perimeter of the property, deadheading flowers, keeping a cool season grass green during the heat of summer, or other evidence is left to the property owner.

• The ordinance must be easy to enforce. Cities are strapped for revenue as it is--requiring horticultural or other specialty knowledge can be expensive. Instituting approved plant lists could be a great way to expand the job market for horticulture majors, but most code enforcement officers are busy dealing with weedy and junk strewn lots. Complaints against non-traditional landscapes actually seldom happen—they just make great news!

• Whenever human nature is involved there is bound to be a complaint. Ordinances need to be sufficiently ambiguous so that they don’t become a large hammer a disgruntled citizen can use against a neighbor they dislike. The vagaries of nature can cause problems too—case in point for the garden in Colorado where an unusually wet winter caused a normally compliant grass to eek over the allowed 12” mark. An ordinance that gave the field inspector some leeway could have avoided a public relations nightmare for the city.

And next: the nightmare of Homeowner Associations.