When Kendall Dunkelberg lived in Austin, Texas, as a graduate student, he quickly noticed how seriously many of his neighbors took their blue bonnets.
When blue bonnets were blooming in the lawns, most people did not mow them, Dunkelberg said. If other neighbors complained about an unkempt yard because of it, so be it.
“You have to let blue bonnets go to seed (if you want them to come back),” Dunkelberg said. “If they are mown too soon, they’re gone.”
Dunkelberg has grown a similar affection for the clump of spiderwort, now in full violet bloom in the front yard of his home on Fourth Street South. Then there’s the Indian Pink, wood sorrel, Southern cherbel and Star of Bethlemen growing here and there throughout his lawn, both for their beauty and to do his part to help the environment.
“We just appreciate, as much as possible, native wildflowers,” Dunkelberg said of he and his wife Kim Whitehead. “We try to let things grow during their season … because we like them and there is a need with native pollinators to be able to access pollen from early spring flowers.”
Dunkelberg and Whitehead have focused on keeping a “natural lawn” since moving to Southside in 1999. They try not to mow at all in early spring, waiting until late April or into May. Even when they do mow, they avoid any patches of blooming wildflowers that pollinators might enjoy.
In their own way, the couple has joined a growing international movement to have refuge lawns for pollinators in urban spaces.
For more than two decades, their neighbors seemed fine with it. Complaints cropped up over the last few years, Dunkelberg said. Last year, they got their first citation from city code enforcement. They were given a certain time frame to mow their yard to avoid a fine. They complied.
But what Dunkelberg and Whitehead are doing also is having another impact. People ask them about it, learn about some of the blooming wildflowers, and over time, more Southside yards have started looking like theirs.
“I wouldn’t claim that we have, but I would hope we have set an example,” Dunkelberg said, smiling.
The social contract
As a turfgrass specialist for Mississippi State University’s Extension Service, Jay McCurdy has plenty of experience with manicured, monocultured lawns that generally make up the urban and suburban residential landscape.
If he’s being honest, he doesn’t really like them. They tend to be high-maintenance, high-input and they don’t promote sustainability.
The opposite response is unsustainable in a different way.
“I think I see people taking this knee-jerk reaction that ‘Lawns are bad. Screw lawns I want whatever the alternative to that is,’” he said. “Well, we live in Mississippi. If you just stop mowing, it’s going to succeed to a transitionary landscape. It’s going to start having small trees and perennial woody species that become much harder to maintain.”
He recently joined a team for United States Department of Agriculture-funded research on refuge lawns that focused on an intermediate way, both acknowledging the “social contract” on properly maintaining your lawn while also shifting the conversation around what is aesthetically appropriate.
From mid-February to mid-April, pollinators have few food sources, McCurdy said, so flowering plants are especially important. Many native pollinators nest in the ground, so mowing in early spring can harm them.
“But in most people’s minds, the reason we’re reducing our mowing frequency is to increase flowering,” McCurdy said.
He promotes leaving areas unmown during a certain time of year, early spring and early fall particularly, and allowing wildflowers to complete their blooming cycle.
In cities, especially when it comes to code enforcement, Columbus City Attorney Jeff Turnage sees problems with a movement like this catching on. Columbus, for example, has a six-inch height restriction for lawns.
“I don’t know that we really have a tolerance for letting a yard grow wild,” he said. “… I can see where someone could say, ‘That’s not my lawn. That’s a flower.’”
“An imaginative person” could modify the code to make special allowances for refuge or native lawns under certain parameters, Turnage said. He suggested confining natural lawns to backyards as a compromise.
Even then, he said enforcement would still be an issue, since some bad actors may abuse the change to simply neglect their lawns.
While science, not public policy, is McCurdy’s arena, he said that comes back to being intentional about honoring the social contract with your neighbors.
Plenty of flowering forbs, for example, don’t exceed city height requirements.
‘It’ll just happen’
Jami Nettles, who owns the Sunstroke House on Sixth Street South, used to keep a stereotypical turf lawn. As time went on, the “lawn” started to disappear and a pollinator refuge began to appear.
A forest hydrologist, she noted research showing urban residents tend to use more herbicide and insecticide in their yards, not only killing insect populations but also polluting water sources.
Coupled with a growing passion for promoting biodiversity, she began converting her yard to a more native habitat, practicing “No Mow March” and being intentional about where and when to mow at all.
“Clover and thistle are two things that are really valuable,” Nettles said. “… There are things every year that come up, and I don’t even know what they are. That’s part of the process – learning what’s out there and selectively tuning it.”
Her refuge lawn is behind a fence, something that has kept code enforcement at bay so far. And she is very intentional about making sure even her unmown yard looks maintained.
“I think for yards … one thing that’s just really easy to do is change the standard of what people think is attractive,” Nettles said. “So instead of saying, ‘Oh, that looks abandoned,’ to go, ‘Wow, look at that clover.’ Because what people don’t like is to live in a neighborhood where it feels like people don’t care about their yard and things look abandoned.”
She hopes code enforcement will take a friendlier look at native lawns.
“People should have that flexibility,” she said. “Let’s see what works. … I suspect if enough people just do it, it’ll just happen.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 35 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
