This Spring, Plant Natives in Your Yard

By rethinking our outdoor spaces, we can use fewer chemicals and water while supporting local wildlife and ecosystems.

Photo by Joe Halinar on Unsplash

Every time Trump wins the Presidency, I head out to the garden. Back in 2016, this meant spending a single afternoon sprucing up a community garden. Our yard and garden were my wife’s domain; I mowed the lawn, but that was it. When I thought about land, my mind went to conservation or restoration out there–on the farms, in the parks, in the wild. I never thought about my yard in Seattle.

That was a mistake. Our yards might be small, but collectively they are massive in size, resource use, and opportunity cost. There are more than 40 million acres of lawn in the United States–or enough to cover Colorado. We use 10 times more chemical pesticide per acre of lawn than farmers use on crops and devote 15 percent or much more of our urban freshwater to lawn care.

These statistics remind me of being a kid and watching my neighbor in suburban Cleveland spend the thousands of hours making his front yard putting green ready. While my Grandma admired it, it was a lawn that served little purpose: no food or habitat for animals, no areas where people could walk or play.

Instead of devoting so much time and energy to “perfecting” lifeless lawns, what if we spent a fraction of that time and energy restoring native plants? Imagine an alternative reality in which a quarter of those acres were devoted to native plants that replenished the soils and fed native animals. That’d restore native plants to an area five times the size of Yellowstone National Park.

Staring into my backyard after the election and pondering these facts, I asked my wife where to channel my newfound interest in native gardening. She pointed to a patch of bamboo that’d snuck through our neighbor’s fence and taken up residence in our yard. Despite having lived here for five years, that was the first time I saw the bamboo as more than a favored pee spot for our dog.

Bamboo roots grow deep and strong. Being a keen novice, I went out there with a weathered shovel that I levered so hard that it split in two. Bamboo: 1; JR: 0. After a false start with a second shovel designed for a small child, I brought out the hand tiller. A year of daily yoga meant that I could actually put some torque into the tiller, and bamboo roots began to give way. Sweat poured down my brow and mixed with a Sunday Seattle smir. For the first time in too long, I felt the satisfaction of sweating in an attempt to improve the world and not just my mental health. The next day, equipped with a new shovel, I finished removing the bamboo. Over the next two weeks, we planted a variety of native plants, grasses, and flowers. My dog, who is obviously too old to learn new tricks, still pees in that corner.

It’s winter now, and all we can do is watch those plants and hope they grow and outcompete the bamboo roots I missed. We have plans to transition the back corner of our yard into a collection of native plants, but that will have to wait until the spring. Still, there’s something reassuring about looking into the yard, sipping a coffee, and knowing that we’re going to change it for the better in 2025.