A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

—Michael Pollan

You’d think I’d be a fan of No Mow May. That’s the idea of giving lawns a whole month to flourish undisturbed, thereby giving pollinators and other living/growing things an opportunity to thrive without mower blades whacking them to bits or chemicals choking them. A UK group called Plantlife (plantlife.org.uk) came up with the idea in 2019. They have a terrific mission statement—they want to “secure a world rich in wild plants and fungi.” Great goal, right? But maybe not the best implementation.

Whaddaya mean? What’s not to love about a movement that encourages lawn worshippers to forgo that Saturday morning mower music?

Maybe the question is why do we have lawns, anyway? Well, it’s a history thing…

“A fine lawn makes a frame for a dwelling,” said Abe Levitt. Mr. Levitt and his sons, William and Alfred, were the creators of Levittown, one of several post-World War II planned communities (the first on Long Island), some bearing the same name, with assembly-line style homes and front lawns (lot size a seventh of an acre, two trees planted the same distance apart). With help from the G.I. Bill, Americans bought them, and their lawns, by the thousands. That wasn’t the beginning of lawns, however, just the beginning of marketing them as something the up and coming middle class homeowner couldn’t be without.

Several hundred years prior to that, about Medieval times, areas around living spaces, whether those were castles or thatched huts, were used for grazing livestock and growing food. Seems like a fairly practical thing to do, as managing vegetation (especially via animals) and cultivating land (again, with some help from animals) has been ongoing for millennia (at least until the advent of homeowners associations and no-livestock-in-town ordinances). Over time, though, land ownership and the accompanying social status it bestowed led to great big houses with expansive manicured grounds and formal gardens around them (think Palace of Versailles or Downton Abbey). The word “lawn,” meaning an expanse of dirt with mown grass, was introduced to the English dictionary in 1757, but the concept of lawns and the wealth needed to maintain them were already rooted (pardon the pun) in the European aristocracy.

Lawns showed up here in the 1700s, around the time cut-grass lawns at English and French estates were replacing those consisting of meadow plants. Immigrants to America as early as the 1600s had begun importing grass seed from Europe as the non-native cattle they were bringing with them couldn’t survive on the native grasses. Even today, most of our lawn grasses are not native species.

Maybe the “When are you gonna take care of that lawn?” question finally got to him, but an English engineer named Edwin Beard Budding was granted the first patent for a mechanical lawn mower in 1830 (it was blades on a cylinder, modeled after his own design of a machine used to cut cloth for making clothing), and lawn care was on its way to becoming a weekly ritual.

In 1868, Connecticut-born Frederick Law Olmsted (a landscape architect whose handiwork can be seen in New York’s Central Park and scores of others across the country), and his partner, Calvert Vaux, were commissioned to design one of the country’s first planned suburbs. The homes in the Riverside, Illinois, community, about nine miles west of downtown Chicago, would have no walls around them, but would have expanses of open, connected yards. Mr. Olmsted, though he designed landscapes with lawns, was also a conservationist who believed in the value of public green space being accessible to all citizens.

Two years later, Elwood McGuire of Richmond, Indiana, designed a lightweight push reel mower. The lawn sprinkler was invented in 1871, and then, in 1935, Leonard Goodall, of Warrensburg, Missouri, came up with a power rotary mower. An abundance of post-World War II chemicals (no longer needed for weapons) made really green and really insect- and weed-free lawns readily available—almost a requirement.

According to a NASA study, lawns, including golf courses, are, in terms of surface areas, the single largest irrigated crop in this country. Lawn care is a multi-billion dollar industry (apply water/fertilizer/pesticides/herbicides, mow, repeat). A commercial gas-powered leaf blower used for one hour produces as much smog-forming pollution as driving 1,100 miles in a car.

Yikes. So why wouldn’t leaving your lawn alone for a month be a good idea? There are a few reasons.

It is great for that month (it doesn’t have to be May, just the month you would typically begin mowing). The pollinators say, hey, look at all these blossoms, let’s hang out here. And they do. Then, chop, chop, the grass is short, the flowers are gone, and the insects are in pieces. The weeds that you left alone for a month are likely flourishing, which may lead you to think you need to use chemicals to regain “control” of the lawn. Those weeds that grew tall might shade the grass, which could lead to fungus. And then there are the little critters who may have taken up residence in the quiet of an undisturbed plot of grass.

And, the neighbors might bitch.

A better plan of action is to establish permanent food and cover for bugs, especially bees and butterflies. Look around to see what grows naturally where you are and work with that—the North American Native Plant Society (nanps.org) and the National Wildlife Federation’s native plant finder site (nativeplantfinder.nwf.org) are good resources if you’re not sure what those plants might be. Worried about ticks? One study (granted, just one) showed that black-legged ticks might prefer leaf litter to grassy areas, which are probably too dry for their taste (leaf piles tend to be damp at the bottom). In any case, just take the recommended precautions like tucking pant legs into the tops of your boots and giving yourself a good once-over after you’ve been outside.

Make paths through your yard with gravel or flat stones or bricks and line the paths with flowers. Go the English garden route (bees love foxglove). Naturalize your yard’s borders. Plant vegetables.

Get some fowl (Guinea hens are reportedly tick-eaters) and let them roam, or use a chicken tractor. Consider a fence and give a cow, a pig, a horse, or a goat a home.

Learn to love a smaller lawn. Mow less overall and set the blade higher. I love that I only mow my lawn about once a summer—the horse does a pretty good job the rest of the time. The grass is weird, anyway. The yard has to really work to be called a lawn, and I don’t encourage it.

To paraphrase my mother, who would sometimes say “use your head for something besides a hat rack,” use your yard for something besides a lawn.