Solution to the water crisis? Kill your grass. Now.

PHOTO by SUSAN SABO

It was lawn-mowing day, but I had forgotten that until a small flat-bed truck pulled up to the curb in front of my house, and my gardener got out. Abel Alegria was a man of such innate happiness that it was his last name. But his cheer darkened to uneasy confusion when he saw I was loading an herbicide sprayer.

“You’re going to do new landscaping?” he asked, choosing his words like a hostage negotiator. “You really don’t need it. We can get rid of these few weeds without killing all the grass.”

“I’m not going to have any grass at all out front, anymore,” I responded definitively, maybe a little more adamantly than I needed to, but I was nervous. “It’s going to be all plants out here—all California native plants. I’ve been studying this, going to meetings. The plants will be pretty. They’ll be natural and they’ll save water.”

Alegria was skeptical, but he struggled not to be judgmental.

“Yeah, well, cool,” he said uncomfortably. “So, you don’t want me to mow the front lawn today?”

“No, I’m going to kill it today,” I emphasized, even more forcefully, as I turned to walk toward the water spigot on the front of the house, leaving Alegria standing in the middle of the yard behind me. “You’ll never have to mow this front lawn again. There’s not going to be a front lawn.”

Although I’d agonized over this decision, it still sounded strange to hear myself declare it to somebody else. It was as though I had finally admitted it to myself. And my immediate reaction was to reconsider it yet again.

See, I liked my front lawn. I was raised to like it. My dad, determined that my suburban upbringing include the kind of strenuous, monotonous, itchy chores that dominated his life growing up on an Iowa farm, made sure I did plenty of lawn work. He was certain it would shape my character. It did. I learned responsibility. I earned spending money by mowing lawns around the neighborhood. I realized I was allergic to grass and pollen. Like, extremely allergic.

Eventually, I grew up to have a nice lawn in front of my own home. It was thick, evergreen, and nearly weed-free. It was mowed and edged every week, although I finally conceded that paying Abel Alegria to do the work was smarter than suffering with all the sneezing and watery eyes. My front lawn gave me a sense of shared values and status with my neighbors. It increased the value of my property. The little kids next door loved to picnic on it, spreading out blankets in the soft grass beneath the big tree on hot summer afternoons. It all looked so perfectly natural, so all-American, like a Southern Californian dream come true.

But it was bullshit. I knew it, and I’d known it for a long time, maybe as far back as family camping trips when I was a kid. I’d noticed how the landscape changed when we left the city’s sweetly contrived greenery and set off into the coarse palette of the dry sage-covered hillsides. Of course, as time passed those hillsides were steadily tamed and green-grassed, too, as suburban development swept relentlessly across the open spaces that used to separate here from there. Now there were no city limits, anymore. The real Southern California was a relic, overwhelmed by a big game of let’s-pretend.

At my own house, even as I admired the plush green carpet I’d cultivated alongside my neighbors, I couldn’t stop thinking about the larger consequences of the urban savannah we’d all created.

Today, as then, immense amounts of water are channeled—from as far away as Mt. Shasta in Northern California—to nourish our lawns. That’s unavoidable, considering the typical patch of grass drinks 82 inches of water a year and our average rainfall is only 13 inches. Half of the water we pour on our grass either evaporates, or worse, runs wastefully into the gutter and through the sewer into lakes, rivers, bays and the ocean—carrying polluting fertilizers and pesticides with it. Water agencies calculate that 73 percent of the water consumed by Los Angeles County’s single-family homes is used outdoors. In Long Beach, that translates into more than 5.2 billion gallons of water a year, which is why the city recently instituted the most stringent water conservation measures in the state.

Those numbers are true today and they were true nine years ago when I realized my front lawn must die, and I must kill it. Truthfully, I wanted to kill your front lawn, too . . . but, well, it turns out there are laws against that kind of thing. Anyway, just as I arrived at the water spigot, before I could reach over and turn the handle that would begin the execution, Abel Alegria called out to me. When I looked back, he was still standing in the middle of my lawn, his straw hat pushed back, his hands on his hips.

“Boy, it’s a shame you’re gonna kill this grass,” he said wistfully.

I shrugged, there was a short silence, and when Alegria spoke again, his tone had changed.

“Shame on you, David,” he said in a rush, trying hard to take the edge off his emotion by mustering a smile, then giving up altogether. “Shame on you.”

“I’m going to keep the grass in the back yard,” I offered conciliatorily.When Alegria moved wordlessly to his truck and unloaded the mower, I thought we’d reached an agreement. But then he pushed the machine to the center of the front lawn and bent over to yank the starter cord.

“I’m going to mow it, anyway,” he asserted quietly.

“Really?” I asked, my eyes open wide, my voice probably sounding shocked, but my heart not really feeling so surprised at all. “You want to?”

“Yes, I want to,” he said, not looking at me. “One last time.”

PHOTO by SUSAN SABO

That story I just told? All true. Nine years later, it’s still my most-poignant tale of suburban yard care. Yes, it’s also the only one. But that might be the story’s moral, especially as Southern California’s worsening water crisis looks like it could become permanent, forcing a lot more people to sacrifice their beloved green carpets of water-sucking, chemically mutant ground cover. The truth is, despite all my advance anxiety, I have not mourned the loss of my front lawn for even a moment since I murdered it.

When the grass died, my anonymous front yard—only a few feet from the four-lane traffic of Lakewood Boulevard—really came to life, reclaiming its identity in the unique ecology of Southern California.

In the rectangular plot where a scientifically engineered green plain paid straight-faced testament to suburbia’s mastery over nature’s quirky aberrations and nuisances, now a dirt path lined with river rock winds through gently undulating earth dotted with weird yet familiar plants that have been growing naturally in California for centuries.

After a couple meetings of the California Native Plant Society—Long Beach doesn’t have a chapter, but Orange County and the Palos Verdes Peninsula do—and one trek to the Tree of Life nursery in San Juan Capistrano, I had enough basic knowledge and plants to begin.

Now a row of rich-smelling sages lines the curb in front of my house, some bearing little blossoms of deep red, others of electric blue, and one of striking violet. Scattered among them are desert marigolds, with bright yellow flowers and dusty looking leaves that the Indians used to use as deodorant, and herba buena, a small ground cover with white flowers and trailing leaves that smell like mint. Larger bushes anchor opposing corners of the yard—the blue-blossomed California lilac on one side, the buttery-cupped island bush poppy on the other, and in between are the wondrous matilija poppies and Mexican prickly poppies, which have blooms that look like sunny-side-up eggs. There is milkweed and monkeyflower and whirling gaura, a plant with flowers that look like flitting butterflies.

The garden attracts lots of real butterflies, too, and hummingbirds—and occasionally indigenous birds I’d never seen around my home. They arrive in a mood that suggests amazed and happy relief, as though they just can’t believe they’ve found a smidgen of their habitat in the middle of all the chrysanthemums, hydrangeas, Marathon III and Miracle-Gro.

“We’ve been swallowed up by an overall appearance we think of as California, but it really isn’t,” says Mike Evans of Tree of Life nursery. “Rather than a series of identical lush grass lawns that must be watered and mowed constantly, the real California is a subtle and varied assortment of flowers and bushes and groundcovers that grow naturally and thrive on whatever rain happens to fall.”

Amazingly, my post-lawn garden is not only more fascinating and rewarding, but it is also easier to care for, cheaper to pay for and pretty much free of environmental guilt.

But nearly a decade later, the most-stunning thing about my native-plant garden is that it’s still the only one on my street. By now, I imagined that my example would have set off a chain reaction among my neighbors, perhaps creating a long continuous restoration of natural habitat across the front yards on our block. Nope.

Their attitude toward my lawnlessness has changed. Originally appalled, then suspicious, and for a long time just uncomfortable, they now periodically express admiration for my makeover. If their front lawns have changed at all, however, they have only gotten greener. My new next-door neighbors have a freakin’ rainforest.

Over time, my attitude toward their green Edens and constant irrigation has gone from discomfort to suspicion to disgust. My consolation is that it soon may become illegal.

At a conference table in his corner office at Long Beach Water Department headquarters, general manager Kevin Wattier—no kidding, the head of the city’s water department is named Wattier—is looking over a prototype for a public-service ad campaign.

The proposal features a close-up photo of an impish little water-fountain cherub, who is holding his teeny weeny, which is emitting a thick stream of water. The adjacent type shouts: WE’RE PISSING AWAY OUR RESERVES! WE’RE IN A DROUGHT BUT WE’RE USING RESERVES TO WATER OUR LAWNS!“

Awww, we really can’t use this,” Wattier says, smiling but also shaking his head. “I mean, it sounds so much better than ‘Please be a more responsible steward of our most-precious resource,’ or something like that. But our phones would be ringing off the hook.”

They’re already ringing a lot as Long Beach residents gradually get the word about the four dramatic water-use prohibitions the Water Department instituted earlier this month.

Suddenly, it’s illegal to wash outdoor paved areas—like driveways, sidewalks, patios—unless you do it with a special water-conserving cleaning device . . . and that old spray nozzle doesn’t quality. Additionally, watering lawns and gardens must be done under very specific conditions: only three days a week, only between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m., never for more than 10 minutes per day and never to the point that water runs onto the pavement.

For now, violators just get a couple of warning notices. But in January a system of fines will likely take effect, beginning at $50 and climbing in increments of $50 if violations continue.

f this sounds extreme, well, it is—at least in comparison with the lip service that every other water agency in California is doing. But the Long Beach Water Department is simply exercising honest common sense.

“The future doesn’t look too good,” says Wattier. “We think it’s more important that we tell people what this could mean and give them plenty of warning rather than wait and see what happens.”

According to Wattier, the problem goes beyond the current drought that last year gave Southern California its driest winter in recorded history.

“Back in 2003 we lost almost half our Colorado River supply because of drought and demands from Arizona and Nevada,” he recites. “Then there was that federal ruling reduced our supply from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta by 30 percent because of the endangered smelt. Now comes news that storage in the three major reservoirs in Northern California has dropped from 90 percent of capacity in March to 42 percent today.”

Consequently, Southern California likely won’t be able to stockpile surplus water anymore, meaning that even a good rainy season this year probably won’t alleviate the crisis.

“That’s why we see this as a long-term change,” says Wattier. “It’s not something where, if we just tighten our belts and pray for rain, everything will be okay in the spring. It could be forever.”

Tags: drought, Long Beach, native plants, water conservation