Meet the Homeowners Spending Tens of Thousands to Let Their Lawns Go Wild
A growing number of people across the U.S. are ditching manicured grass for native plants and trees
8 min
Within Denver’s Washington Park neighbourhood, an enclave south of downtown where the median house listing price is just over $2 million, quintessential manicured American lawns roll out in front of historic brick bungalows, restored Victorians and contemporary new builds. Then there is Lisa Negri’s yard, which sits adjacent to her three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow where she’s lived since 2012.
“It looks like nature,” says Negri, 66, a retired engineer.
Roughly 50,000 plants comprising 92 species engulf her 0.14-acre lot, which until 2020 sported green lawn grass. She estimates the yard has cost roughly $75,000 for plants, bulbs, seeds and hardscaping. Negri’s creation, designed by Denver Botanic Gardens assistant curator of horticulture Kevin Philip Williams, rejects the time-honoured status symbol of a tidy lawn in favour of a new luxury: the rewilded yard.
“Rewilding is returning land to a more natural state,” says Allison Messner, co-founder and CEO of Yardzen, a landscape design company with clients nationwide. Rewilding a yard typically involves introducing regionally appropriate plants, also called native plants, and fostering habitats for local wildlife. People come to the practice for myriad reasons. Some people want to support pollinators; some want to avoid water-guzzlers; others want to signal they are climate conscious. But the overarching purpose is universal: to encourage the flourishing of natural ecosystems and to mitigate the effects of habitat loss and climate change.
In Negri’s yard, this means interweaving prairie grasses and southwestern shrubs commingle with pockets of bulbs, wildflowers and succulents, all chosen to thrive in Denver’s climate, which is warm and dry in the summer and harsh in the winter, and has fierce year-round sun because of the altitude. Plants also specifically open the door to animals, insects, fungi and bacteria.
The space is one big meshed movement that throughout the year waxes and wanes in colour, height, shape and texture. A low-slung, post-winter skeletal brown becomes spring’s sprouting rainbow of lush hues, which gives way to summer’s 8-foot, reach-for-the-sky feathery silvers and waxy blues before fall’s explosion of radioactive yellows and Martian reds take hold for a last gasp as winter’s white waits in the wings.
A total of 9,000 plants and bulbs were planted in 2020, largely with help from neighbours and friends. Since then, Negri has planted fewer than 1,000 new plants but has added a large number of seeds. It took a year of significant watering to get roots established. Now the only substantial maintenance required is cutting the yard to the ground in the spring and watering two to three times a year.
“A niche group of people has supported yard rewilding over the past decade or so, but recently it’s become much more mainstream,” Messner says. In 2022, Yardzen saw a 66% year-to-year increase in clients replacing green lawn grass with fully rewilded yards. “We’re not seeing thousands of people say, ‘Tear out my lawn and put in a rewilded yard,’ ” she says, but the majority of Yardzen’s clients are rewilding in some capacity. Last year, 90% of new Yardzen clients installed some type of native plants. “Things are moving in this direction,” she says.
Rewilded yards look different depending on climate and topography. In general, however, they support the web of life from below the ground up to the canopy, and every ecological layer in between, says Melissa Marie Wilson, CEO of Mill Valley, Calif.-based landscape firm Want Green Gardens. Lawns are nonexistent or minimized with native grasses. Plants bloom throughout the seasons. Native trees anchor the yard and provide wildlife with food and year-round shelter.
Eden Passante, 38, and Zan Passante, 47, worked with Yardzen to rewild their half-acre lot about 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles in the ranch community of Newhall, Calif. They purchased the property in 2016 for $560,000 and spent $400,000 gut-renovating their space, which totals 2,100 square feet and has three bedrooms, three bathrooms and a guesthouse. They estimate they have spent $65,000 on rewilding. Plants cost about $10,000; hardscaping cost the most. The bulk of the designing and planting took five months.
Today, the grassless yard is filled with whimsical flowers and succulents, such as blue chalksticks and large blue agaves. Gravel pathways lead to sitting and dining areas and a fire pit. There are garden beds for vegetables and edible flowers and a separate herb garden for mint, thyme, oregano and pineapple sage. A citrus grove has a Eureka lemon tree, a Meyer lemon tree, a yellow grapefruit tree, a lime tree and an orange tree.
“They are half native plants but all of the plants are drought-tolerant and zoned for this area,” says Eden Passante, who is the CEO of the home-entertaining website Sugar and Charm. Wildlife is active in the yard. A partridge laid 12 eggs under a bush. Pollinators love the blooming citrus trees.
The yard is low maintenance. “I try to let nature do its thing, but I remove any invasive weeds and keep the pathways nice,” she says. “The only difficulty is keeping the dust, rocks and pebbles out of the house.” Sometimes she wishes there was a soft play surface for her two young children.
Emily Murphy, an ethnobotanist with a background in ecology and environmental science and author of the regenerative gardening book Grow Now, says it is easy to get in the weeds with rewilding terminology. “It’s evolving in real time,” she says, noting that the word rewilding sprung up in conservation biology and ecology circles in the 1990s in reference to large-scale efforts to restore biodiversity and improve the integrity of landscape and natural systems.
Murphy says that rewilding a yard will obviously look very different from rewilding, say, a National Park. “Purists would say—and there is always a purist—that your yard can’t be compared to the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone.” But she believes that rewilded yards do contribute to the greater good. “Once you plant native plants, biodiversity will come,” she says, giving the example of a native oak tree, which can support roughly 2,300 species of animals and insects. In comparison, a non-native Chinese ginkgo has been documented to support five or fewer local species.
Jennifer Ehlert, vice president of landscape design firm Metro Blooms Design+Build in Minneapolis, says rewilding costs roughly the same as other landscaping. “A DIY pollinator patch might be in the hundreds,” she says. “Hiring a landscaping company to design and build some portion of a rewilded yard might be in the thousands. Rewilding your whole yard might be in the tens of thousands. If you’re into the hundreds of thousands, you have a huge property or you’re hardscaping as part of a bigger project.”
Dan Dufficy, founder of Mill Valley, Calif.-based California Native Landscapes nursery, encourages clients to start small. “Customers aren’t used to seeing these plants,” he says. “Their friends aren’t used to seeing these plants. They have no idea what the maturity of the product looks like.” To help clients get excited, he uses his hands to animate what plants look like and he uses vivid, educational language.
Not everyone is excited about yard rewilding. Homeowner associations can have landscape aesthetic rules. People who are allergic to bees have legitimate concerns. And then there are neighbours who just don’t get it.
Her first summer of rewilding, Lisa Negri in Denver received a cease-and-desist order from the city, which closed her down for eight months. “A neighbour called the city on me and said, ‘We don’t know what this person is doing. We’re afraid of it,’ ” Negri says. With the help of her garden designer and several horticulturists, she put together a 90-page presentation and ultimately received an open space conservation zoning designation, which is one of several types of conservation-related protections homeowners could pursue locally. Some cities—such as Austin, Texas, Evanston, Ill., and Green Bay, Wisc.—have passed ordinances in support of wildlife-friendly homeowners. This is also happening at the state level. In Minnesota, for example, a new state law bans cities from limiting managed natural landscapes.
In Santa Monica, Calif., Roshanna Baron is having an opposite problem: Neighbours are copying her 0.13-acre rewilded yard. She and her husband, Nir Einhorn, 48, bought their house for $1.1 million in 2017. The couple received a landscaping blank slate when their yard was torn up during a nine-month renovation of their home, which has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and totals 2,220 square feet, including their short-term rental guesthouse.
Planning their fully rewilded yard lasted about a month. Buying and installing $4,000 worth of plants took about two weekends with the help of a gardener. At first the landscaping felt empty, but after a year it was grown in. Three years later, the yard is colourful and warm with green- and blue-tinted plants, flowering succulents and a Meyer lemon tree. They kept a 75-year-old persimmon tree, the fruit of which keeps getting better as the yard’s soil improves.
“I’ve been stopped several times from husbands or wives saying they are planning on copying our yard,” says Roshanna Baron, 51, who works in entertainment industry talent relations and event planning. “One specifically told me he was copying everything because his wife loved it so much. A stranger parked in front of our home to tell me they aspire to have a yard like this.”
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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