Current mood:

flush with possibility

Moss lawn
So, one of the big challenges Jamie and I are faced with every summer is our completely cruddy lawn. Our plot is small--less than half and acre--but we have no less than six full grown trees on it, more than half of which are at least 50 years old. We love these trees, particularly the maple that shades most of the backyard, which feels in summer like a structure constantly unfolding into a new addition for the house. You can sit on my deck and look straight up into it, where birds flit from branch to branch and squirrels run back and forth. The light is constantly shifting, so it feels like a space that is restlessly reinventing itself. It is, without exaggeration, my favorite "room" in the house, all the more so for not being a room in reality at all. Beyond the aesthetic delights, the maple and its kind are also great for our summer cooling bill (last year we turned on our air conditioning for a total of 9 days), but all the shade does tend to inhibit the growth of grass. And vegetables. And just about everything else. That's the price we pay. The back yard is particularly bad, where sparse tufts of grass punctuate the clay like hair on the head of someone with a hormone imbalance--and believe me, I would be the one to know about hormone imbalanced coiffures. Often mowing this lawn feels like a purely academic exercise, a few clips here and there on grass that is largely unchanged from the week before.

I don't mind slow growing grass, but the gaps in the lawn are problematic, especially as Jamie and I tend to play a lot of Bocce after dinner. It's not long before the balls are muddy and gross. There just isn't enough grass to lay down between them and the ground. I started feeling an especially urgent need to address the lawn situation when my nephew was here and often playing out back. I realized the sparse grass made for an uneven surface for him to run around on, resulting in more than a few tumbles.

In the past I have found myself wondering if the solution isn't to do away with the grass entirely. For awhile I envisioned a thyme lawn, but realistically that's not going to grow any better than the grass does. So I shifted to shadier visions: what if I replace the grass in my back yard with moss? Just the thought of it gives me a little thrill and takes me back to my youth, where the finishing touch on all the little forts we used to build in the woods would be to construct a moss "carpet" for the interior. There is something that just feels so decadent and lush about the idea, almost as though I had decided to rip up my grass and replace it with velvet. Plus, it would be a truly native lawn, full of the kinds of plants that should be growing in this area anyway, as opposed to the artificially imported grass. But can it be done?

Apparently, I am not the first person to dream up this idea. The final segment of Science Friday on NPR was about a "moss guru" in Pennsylvania who 40 years ago did exactly what I am envisioning. He got rid of his grass--rather unceremoniously--and got a moss lawn going instead. I was surprised and even encouraged to hear that less work would be involved than I had even imagined--apparently, the very act of acidifying your soil to get rid of the grass prepares the way for moss spores to start taking root. It has really gotten my gears going, as has the related video clip of the interview with him. Wouldn't I love to have his charm as well as his lawn?