Switched from sod to native wildflowers and the difference is night and day

I spent three summers fighting to keep a fescue lawn alive in my Nashville backyard. It looked terrible every August no matter how much I watered. I tore it all out last fall and put in a mix of purple coneflower and black-eyed susans from a local nursery. The bees love it and I haven't touched a sprinkler once this year. Has anyone else made the switch from grass to something more native?

2 comments

2 Comments

gibson.oliver1mo ago

I saw a study not too long ago that said lawns take up something like 40 million acres in the US alone, most of it non-native grass that does almost nothing for local insects. You've basically turned a dead zone into a functioning little ecosystem. My sister did the same thing with her front yard in Virginia, used a seed mix from the state's native plant society, and she said the fireflies came back after years of nobody seeing them. It makes you wonder why we keep fighting nature instead of letting it do the work for us.

blairwhite1mo ago

Does your sister have the same problem I did with the neighbors giving her funny looks? I did a small patch in my back corner and got nothing but questions, but now that it's full of bees and birds a couple of them are actually asking me for tips.