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Maggie Slepian | Longreads | May 14, 2026 | 3,297 words (12 minutes)
It is September 2023, and I am standing in my front yard with a leaf bag over my head. A gap-toothed rake lies in a pile of leaves and a thistle stabs the side of my foot. My back aches. A blister pulses on my thumb. It’s sometime in the afternoon, but I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been out here.
Three lopsided leaf bags sit like giant potatoes around the yard, but the fourth bag kept tipping when I tried to dump my rakeful of leaves. I snapped the bag open in a fit, reaching up inside to punch the seams open. Then I let it go, allowing it to settle over my head and fall to my waist. It is quiet inside the leaf bag, and in the visual break from my lawn and five cumulative years of failure, I start crying. The lawn has defeated me.
In the beginning, this was a field. It was also riparian zones and shrubland, deciduous forest, and grassland. Long before I-90 bisected the valley and four-lane arteries divided neighborhoods into a sprawling suburban grid, this valley was a high-traffic wildlife corridor where elk, pronghorn, wolves, and hundreds of bird species moved unencumbered between the mountain ranges. Today, a checkerboard of subdivisions crosses east to west, and the remaining grasslands are buried each day under reeking asphalt and rolls of turfgrass.
The wild green of the valley has been replaced with monotonous turfgrass squares that have changed little in appearance since the 18th century, when American landowners first tried to mimic the manicured grounds of English aristocracy. The lawn as we know it is a direct result of these manufactured social standards, which Virginia Scott Jenkins calls “examples of conspicuous consumption” in her book The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession. A tidy green carpet in front of each house established a clear boundary between well-off homeowners and those without the resources to maintain their property.
Yet, monoculture lawns affect us more than their serene uniformity suggests. They provide no natural habitat or nutritional value for insects and small animals. Most popular turfgrass species aren’t native to the US, and so to keep them alive, we apply vast amounts of water, chemicals, labor, and money. Turfgrass covers an estimated 62,500 square miles in the US—it’s a callous waste of water and habitat, neither of which we can afford to squander.
But no one was thinking about this as the American front lawn went mainstream, and 150 years after someone decided to mimic European aristocracy, I am crying in my yard trying to prove that I haven’t failed to maintain this property alone.
I bought my house in 2018, five years before the Leaf Bag Incident. Achieving homeownership felt like a necessary mark of success—I was single (again) with a questionable freelance career and none of the other benchmarks I felt like I should have achieved at 30. But the house came saddled with insecurities, and I knew I could only afford it because of an insurance settlement from a car crash six years earlier. Call it the bastardization of the Millennial Dream, where you almost-die-but-not-quite.
The neighborhood in Bozeman, Montana, was the platonic ideal of a mountain-town suburb. Children kicked scooters down unblemished asphalt and lawns were crossed with the parallel stripes of a recent mow. A young couple pushed a mulch-filled wheelbarrow across an immaculate yard and families walked dogs down the gently curving streets. I took a self-timered photo in front of the Sale Pending sign, trying to manufacture a cocktail of confidence and gratitude. Be proud, I told myself. You deserve this and you can handle it.
But unlike lower-commitment purchases like a car or an air fryer, a house doesn’t come with an owner’s manual, and every hollow whoosh through the vents meant the furnace was imploding or a pipe was bursting. I did not, however, catastrophize my lawn. It had no structural mechanism. It was just grass.
But unlike lower-commitment purchases like a car or an air fryer, a house doesn’t come with an owner’s manual, and every hollow whoosh through the vents meant the furnace was imploding or a pipe was bursting.
A month after buying the house, though, I hovered over a friend’s shoulder as he changed the settings on an irrigation control panel I had just learned existed.
“The system should water each zone for 20 minutes every night.” He pointed to a knob in a sea of knobs. “Just twist this dial for more, but these settings should bring the grass back to life.”
“OK, I think I got it,” I said, staring blankly at the gray box.
He hopped on his bike, calling over his shoulder. “You should probably mow at some point, too.”
The lawn came into focus. The grass was several inches higher than the month before, shaggy and unkempt, with scattered patches of sickly brown. A mean-looking weed nosed around the walkway. Yellow dandelions bobbed in the breeze.
“Yeah, I will,” I said, shooing him down the driveway before he could see I didn’t own a lawnmower.
Grass height turned out to be the least of my concerns. The previous owners must have doused the property with chemicals, and as summer wheezed toward its smoky end, my lawn became less suburban ideal and more of a pop quiz in weed identification. Spotted spurge crawled along the edges; bull thistle exploded in nasty spined stalks that seemed to grow a foot overnight. I dutifully raked and bagged the cottonwood leaves as the days shortened, paying a $60 surcharge for the waste-management pickup. I was relieved when it snowed.
I’ll worry about the yard in the spring, I thought.
As often happens when you say I’ll worry about it later, later happened, and spring brought a bumper crop of dandelions absolutely thrilled to have found a yard owned by an anti-pesticide crusader with no affinity for lawn care. I mowed twice a week to knock down the yellow blossoms, but by the end of the second summer, my lawn was the weediest on the street, and the polite HOA email touting the importance of tidy, weed-free lawns felt like a dagger through the computer screen.
I briefly considered calling the “really good lawn guy” on the business card my neighbor handed over, but as a third-generation pesticide hater, spraying my lawn wasn’t something I could do in good conscience. My grandfather was a chemist who understood enough about pesticides to refuse to use them, despite their rapid rise in the 1960s. My mom passed down this distaste, including what I dismissed as conspiracy theories about poisoned dogs, though a 2012 Environmental Research study linked lawn-care pesticides to increased risk of canine cancer, and veterinary clinics have special treatment plans for pets exposed to lawn chemicals. Lawn chemicals also kill beneficial insects indiscriminately, contributing to population declines with disastrous ecological implications at every trophic level. Pollutants leak into waterways and poison our drinking water. Is it really worth killing the dandelions?
But I didn’t say any of this. I accepted the card, my face burning as I waded through the sea of dandelions back to my house.
My tenuous grasp on control was slipping. I didn’t know how to take care of my high-maintenance lawn, and I was getting increasingly mad about having to deal with it. I cranked up the irrigation in an attempt to revive the browning surface, groaning out loud when my water bill nearly doubled.
My tenuous grasp on control was slipping. I didn’t know how to take care of my high-maintenance lawn, and I was getting increasingly mad about having to deal with it.
It felt like a colossal waste, especially since I live in a semi-arid region that receives just 16–18 inches of precipitation per year. My town’s 60,000 residents rely on three snowpack-driven water sources that are increasingly affected by climate change. Our summers are becoming hotter and drier, and earlier spring runoff means more aggressive watering later in the summer to keep lawns alive.
While snowpack continues to vary at the higher elevations, winter in the valleys are getting dryer. I stopped in a convenience station during an unnervingly warm spring bike ride and picked up a brochure on the counter. What a DRY WINTER means for Bozeman yards, the header blared, followed by bullet points promoting services for keeping our lawns green amid groundwater concerns.
Outside the store, a curl of smoke rose from behind a ridge to the south. I snapped a photo, then opened the local wildfire tracker. By July, I imagined every non-irrigated green space in the valley would be a gasping, singed brown under a haze of wildfire smoke. It was going to be a very dry summer.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, around one-third of all residential water use goes toward outdoor irrigation. Consider that fact, given that the United Nations recently reported the world is entering an era of “global water bankruptcy.” If we could abandon our notion of the perfect lawn and accept crispy grass in August, or view weeds not as enemies of our suburban ideal but as elements of a natural environment, the EPA says we could save up to 9 billion gallons per day.
My lawn was dying anyway. I reduced the watering times and waited for the snow to return.
By the time 2023 rolled around, I’d spent five years trying to keep my lawn at some level of socially acceptable, and my only reward was happy dandelions punctuating dead Kentucky bluegrass and naked dirt. I still refused to use pesticides, but in a last-ditch effort, I thought I might try overseeding.
I trailed behind a kindly, heavily mustachioed man as he guided me around the local hardware store. Shelves sagged under thick plastic fertilizer bags in a riot of colors, bottles of chemicals, grass seed, grass feed, weed killer, soil supplements, fungicides, hoses, fertilizer spreaders, mite killers, stakes, weed netting. A thousand ways to whack, tame, control, and bully my quarter-acre into submission. Loaded down with several hundred dollars of grass seed, nontoxic fertilizer, and a hand spreader, I drove home feeling cautiously optimistic.
But the grass seed failed to take, and by fall, the only green left was thistles and crabgrass. I wandered the neighborhood looking for other suburban failures, but my lonely walks confirmed my yard was the worst on the street. I had proven to myself and my neighborhood that I had failed.
I tried to mitigate the disintegrating exterior with frenzied interior control. I scrubbed imaginary streaks from the entryway and gathered wisps of dust into my fists from behind the furniture. I wiped fingerprints from doorjambs and plumped the corners of my pillows to 90-degree angles. Outside, the front yard continued to shrivel and die.
“My yard is driving me completely insane,” I texted a friend, gazing at the mess from my front porch. I felt like a Dust Bowl farmer leaning on a pitchfork, staring in despair over his dying crops.
“You need to touch grass,” she wrote back.
“That’s the problem. My grass is DEAD.”
Sensing a losing battle, she didn’t respond.
I brought up my lawn at book club, on work calls, to the nice lady who set up her yoga mat next to mine. Whoever entered my airspace was at risk of becoming an unwilling participant in a conversation about bull thistles and turfgrass.
I still dragged myself outside every weekend to clean up leaves and try to tame the weeds, but by the time the giant leaf bag settled over my head on that sunny autumn afternoon, I was done.
That night, with no one to talk to about the moral and environmental failings of turfgrass, I typed I hate my lawn into my phone and was funneled straight to r/NoLawns on Reddit. Turns out, a lot of people also hate their lawns.
In the cobwebs of my mind, I must have known native landscaping and regenerative yard meadows existed, but I’d been so overwhelmed by my solo landscaping failures that I didn’t consider alternatives. I scrolled photos of pebble-lined xeriscaping, natural water features, glistening berry bushes, and before-and-afters of ragged grass transformed into a riot of flowers sagging with pollen-covered bee butts. Photos were accompanied by trails of comments and replies praising the grass removal and offering advice and commentary on the range of plants and explosion of life.
Oh, I thought, gazing into the hypnotic glow of my phone. I can just kill my lawn. On purpose.
I started seeing little urban ecosystems everywhere. Instead of monotonous green, these naturally landscaped lawns and public spaces were organized chaos: moss and ground cover bordered squat flowering shrubs, slender stalks topped with purple blossoms hummed with bees. Mulch and landscaping rocks covered the majority of the surface, turfgrass vanquished to narrow strips between garden beds.
Oh, I thought, gazing into the hypnotic glow of my phone. I can just kill my lawn. On purpose.
The natural landscaping I saw wasn’t a random assortment of flowers and bushes—they were intentionally designed ecosystems populated with grasses and plants that would still exist in the valley without modern urbanization, providing mini oases for the insects, pollinators, and tiny animals who evolved alongside them. As tenders of our small patches of planet, why not do the most with it? Landscaping with a diversity of pollinator-friendly plants provides habitat, forage, and shelter for bees, butterflies, birds, mice, and voles, along with healthier soil for decomposers like worms and beetles, which, in turn, provide nutrients as they move up the food chain. Each of these tiny beings is critical to the health of an ecosystem. I wanted to help them.
I flattened a dozen cardboard boxes and placed them in an overlapping arrangement along my side yard. I returned to the hardware store for a truckload of mulch, spreading a thick layer over the cardboard. The cardboard would disintegrate over the winter, killing the weeds and remaining grass while leaving rich soil for planting. I also ordered two yards of landscaping rocks and spread them across the other side yard, marking spots for drought-tolerant, pollinator-friendly plants.
Instead of dragging my mower around the yard with the energy of someone bound for the gallows, I looked forward to working outside. My massive pile of rocks was an easy conversation starter, and without the looming shame of my decrepit lawn, I became friendlier with my neighbors. It turned out there was more going on behind the scenes (and fences) than I’d thought.
Mariah, a PhD student down the street, had raised a robust flock of chickens and ducks in her backyard. The hens pecked at our shoes as we compared notes on pollinator bushes, and I walked home loaded down with two full cartons of fresh eggs. At the other end of the neighborhood, Whitni chased me down the street with armfuls of cucumbers and tomatoes from her raised-bed gardens and a jar of honey from her backyard beehives. She’d been working for four years to remove almost all of the grass from her back yard and transform her front yard into a regenerative meadow.
Turfgrass might still reign supreme, but conversations are changing, and I’m not the only one to chafe against the environmental impact. The arguments for maintaining ornamental turfgrass in the face of drought, pollinator extinction, and fertilizer toxicity are getting harder to stomach, and a 2017 Society & Natural Resources study found yard care practices often don’t reflect homeowners’ preferences, but instead their “perceptions of the neighbors’ expectations for what the individual’s lawn should look like,” and a recent New York Times op-ed also claims the “era of the American lawn is over.” Thank goodness.
My outdoor-oriented community has multiple initiatives to encourage water conservation, including rebates for homeowners who remove grass, and limiting turfgrass in new developments.
Jessica Ahlstrom, Bozeman’s water conservation program manager, told me the initiatives are working. Water use for residential lawns and irrigation has dropped 20% over the past several years, and the town instituted mandatory watering restrictions in 2022.
According to lawn care experts, the Kentucky bluegrass—one of the most popular types of turfgrass—requires one to two inches of water per week to stay green during the summer, so it’s a small comfort that ornamental grass limitations are gaining traction. Las Vegas passed a law in 2021 banning much of the valley’s ornamental turfgrass starting in 2027, and Phoenix wants to remove nonfunctional turfgrass from medians and business parks. Multiple towns in Colorado have also begun limiting turfgrass in new developments.
“Our traditional landscapes are ecological deserts,” says Jennifer Mohler, executive director of land stewardship nonprofit Grow Wild. Mohler has dedicated her career to planting native gardens in public spaces, helping restore the foundation of our local ecological system.
“There’s a sense that what we’re doing now is not working,” she said. “People are starting to recognize we are connected to our landscape, and you can manage your landscape more in line with environmental sustainability.” This can be as easy as replacing non-native grass with clover, which requires less water and can stabilize soil nitrogen levels, or mowing your lawn every two weeks instead of every week, which, as urban ecology expert Susannah Lerman found, increases lawn flowers which attract pollinators.
Very rarely is it too late, even in the densest urban areas. New York City’s High Line was an abandoned elevated railway destined for demolition until the late ’90s, when people began noticing the natural spread of native plants along its crumbling infrastructure. Today, after 25 years of cultivation, the High Line is home to over 500 species of plants, grasses, trees, bees, flowers, and birds, all native to southern New York.
Universities are also using their grounds as real-world conservation teaching opportunities, from Northern Iowa’s prairie grasslands to wetland preserves in Wisconsin. Minnesota’s Wildflower Project has spent the last decade planting pollinator gardens along medians and railways. It’s a small bud of hope amid the onslaught of dire environmental news.
The more we normalize no longer proving our worth with grass, the more we can convince people to find beauty beyond a featureless green carpet.
Once my mulch beds were ready, I planted 10 little bushes, including white aster, Russian sage, and magenta bee balm. Butterflies and bees descended within a week, and on a whim, I allowed a half-dozen aspen trees to grow uninhibited in my backyard. The plants required far less water than the long-suffering grass, and with little labor on my part, they’d doubled in size by the next summer. If I stood quietly, I could hear the thrum of bees as they dropped clumsily between hundreds of tiny flowers.
Two years after the Leaf Bag Incident, my unremarkable patch of earth is more mulch, rock, and flowering plants than grass. I even let the dandelions spread across the remaining grass after seeing how many bees were dotted throughout the yellow blooms. I’ve connected with neighbors about their lawn restoration projects, traded books on native landscaping, and learned more about what it takes to become a certified Wildlife Habitat. Instead of shame over my ugly lawn, I mentally map my next flower placement. I’ve stopped bagging the fallen leaves, leaving the detritus to sit under the snow and provide protection for overwintering insects. Happier bugs, fewer leaf bags to cry under. Instead of a symbol of ineptitude, my yard is becoming a slow success in a way I couldn’t have imagined when I stood on the dense mat of turfgrass and took a self-conscious photo in front of the sale pending sign.
Instead of a symbol of ineptitude, my yard is becoming a slow success in a way I couldn’t have imagined when I stood on the dense mat of turfgrass and took a self-conscious photo in front of the sale pending sign.
My subdivision will never again be fields and meadows, the valley will never be an unbroken wildlife corridor. When I picture the valley from above, I see a patchwork of asphalt and lifeless turfgrass where once existed an explosively rich habitat for thousands of species.
I also picture something else: my lawn as a brief reprieve for something small and tired flying overhead, an attempt at atoning for whatever contribution I’ve made to the exhaustion of our planet. In this way, when I plant new bulbs or watch sparrows bend the slender aspen branches in my backyard, I can tell myself I’ve succeeded.
Maggie Slepian is a full-time writer based in Montana. Her work focuses on the intersection of outdoor culture, travel, and mental health, and has appeared in the New York Times, Outside, Lonely Planet, the Strategist, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. If she’s not abroad or in the backcountry, she’s probably hanging out with her cat.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
