Modern Turf Wars

Sun., Aug. 9, 1998

National Audubon Society

Environment

A national campaign to reverse the lawn mania in America by restoring home and industrial grounds to more harmonious, productive, ecologically-sound, naturalistic landscapes, has been launched by a botanist at Connecticut College.

The program is called SALT- Smaller American Lawns Today.

“America’s lawn-care fetish - a bourgeois obsession that’s right up there with trying to keep up with the Joneses - is becoming passe,” said botany professor William Niering, SALT founder.

The wave of the future is the naturalistic, ecology route - using native shrubs and plantings that are both attractive and environmentally sound,” said Niering.

Niering says that planting lawns with native species plants, meadows, orchards, vegetable gardens, perennials or annuals, trees and shrubs instead of maintenance-intensive grass will cut down substantially on noise, air and water pollution.

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