The grass wasn’t greener – turning my lawn into a garden ate my time and freed my mind

I was sitting on my haunches weeding when a couple passed by on the sidewalk. “Nice garden,” one of them said, so I thanked her. She shrieked. I believe she’d mistaken me for a gnome. Once we had all agreed I was not a ceramic, we had a nice chat and I gave them a garden tour.

“You don’t have any lawn at all?” they said. “That’s really smart. Lawns are so much work!”

“Huh,” I said.

Well. I had just spent 20 minutes handpicking weeds in an area the size of a bath mat. The way lawns work, you take a machine to the thing, and apply fossil fuel and a mess of decibels, and your property is nicely coiffed in a jiffy. Maybe you edge it, too, if you’re fussy. But compared with what I do in my garden, inch by inch, on a double lot in the city, lawn maintenance is like giving Michelangelo the Sistine Chapel gig and handing him a paint roller.

There’s a whole no-lawn movement out there, and plenty of good reasons for it. You can conserve water, encourage pollinators, and eschew fertilizers and pesticides. Better yet, going lawn-free confers on the gardener a priceless stamp of virtue. Here in Portland, Oregon, you can even display a “Certified Backyard Habitat” yard sign as a badge of honor. You can annoy no end of people with one of those.

I’m happy to assume that mantle of purity, but the main reason my garden is turf-free is that there was always something more interesting to plant. And there’s only so much space. I used to have a lawn, but bit by bit it got carved out for flowers, ferns, and other floral frippery. By the time the lawn had dwindled to a dot, there was no point to it at all.

And for a good two months before summer sets in, I am squatting gnomelike in that garden coaxing out the plants I don’t want in favor of those I do. The plan is that when I get everything cleared, I’ll lay in a mountain of mulch. Except by the time I’ve weeded the whole place, I need to start over. I’m never quite done.

It sounds like the very definition of tedium. But the puttery nature of it is immensely gratifying. It reorders the brain. I couldn’t say what I’m thinking about while I work my way through the beds – certainly nothing coherent. But there’s satisfaction on a cellular level in seeing those weeds slip out of the soil. The clear spaces gained have their counterparts in my mind, in the recesses where worry and regret might otherwise clump up. Even the fragrance of healthy soil is restorative. And weirdly familiar, like an ancient memory. Maybe we’re not so very far from our microbial ancestors.

I like being close to the ground. There’s a lot of life down there, if you’re gardening right. Things are wriggling, scuffling, jetting by your ear on the way to nectar. They’re busy doing the best they can with what they have to work with. In the face of all that industry, my own concerns are revealed to be trivial. So what if my wireless is down for the day? There are juncos mining my yard debris for nesting material. There are larvae with a lot to learn before they can become journeymen butterflies.

I can’t say I don’t interfere. Sometimes I unearth some tasty arthropod and flip it topside to see if I can interest a bird with it. The case can be made that grown-ups should have better things to do than fling grubs to scrub jays, although none come immediately to mind.

I’m not sure what sort of mental real estate I enter when I putter in the garden, but I can get to the same neighborhood with art, or music, or writing. All of it quiets the mind and clears out clutter, rearranges the cerebral furniture for a better flow, and gives creativity room to stretch out.

This garden plot has already got an outline. Its characters have been developed. I don’t have the ending worked out, and I’m always editing. It’s an act of creation like any other, and it is beautiful. There’s no explaining what beauty does for us. No denying it, either.

So yes: I spend many hours at something that looks like labor in my garden. But my new friends from the sidewalk are right. For many people, a lawn is a lot of work. It demands perfection and steals part of their precious weekend. If something gets in the way of your downtime, it’s work.

But if it’s what you wish you were at home doing when you’re at work, it’s not.