Brown is the new Green

Letting a lawn go in the face of drought restrictions wasn’t easy for some California residents. By Steven Krutz.

YOLANDA Muñoz was leading a double life, water-wise.

As an accountant for the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District, in Monterey, Calif., Ms. Muñoz heard grim predictions of water shortages and rationing as the state’s continuing drought intensified. But each night, she returned to her home in an older neighborhood on the peninsula, which had a lawn so large and lush she and her husband, Ed, put in a bench.

“We had a beautiful parklike setting,” Ms. Muñoz said. “It had a lot of curb appeal. I hated to give up the lawn.”

Still, it seemed like the only responsible thing to do. How could she continue to justify this profligate use of water in the face of such widespread shortages?

Contemplating life without a lawn, she moved through the stages of grief, from anger (“I want this lawn!”) to bargaining (“We thought about doing a design where half the lawn would be saved and half ripped out, like a kidney shape”) to depression (“I felt it was kind of hypocritical of me”) and finally to acceptance (“We contacted Hill and Dale,” a local landscaping company).

Four months ago, Ms. Muñoz replaced her guilty pasture with a mix of drought-tolerant plants and non-thirsty boulders and gravel. In place of the daily sprinkler rinse, she now has a water-conserving drip irrigation system. She is slowly adjusting to the native look, she said, scattering wildflower seeds that will sprout this spring.

With rainfall at below-normal levels for several years, and streams dry and reservoirs critically low, particularly in northern areas — even after the storms at the end of last month — many Californians are facing the reality that in the arid West the well-manicured lawn is no longer realistic, or even possible. Some cities have tightly restricted water use; others have raised usage rates to levels that make grass a luxury item.

As for what constitutes a suitable alternative to the lawn, opinions abound. The Seaside Garden Center, on the Monterey Peninsula, recently held a workshop on artificial turf. Chuck Ingels, a horticulture adviser at the University of California Cooperative Extension, in Sacramento, has experimented with meadow-like buffalo grass and dune sedge. And one Oakland couple is starting a neighborhood competition next month to promote replacing the lawn with vegetable gardens and native plants.

Lorena Gonzalez, an assemblywoman whose district includes southern San Diego, believes “brown is beautiful,” as she put it, and has proposed a bill to allow residents of homeowners’ associations to put in drought landscaping or artificial turf or stop watering their grass without incurring fines.

Meanwhile, in Beverly Hills and other affluent Southern California communities, bright-green, golf-course-plush, triple-fescue lawns remain as ubiquitous as the teams of gardeners required to tend them.

In true California fashion, the garden hose (or, more precisely, what comes out of it) has lately taken on a mystical bent. This weekend, Paola Berthoin, an artist, will be a leader of a retreat to explore the sacred nature of water. Participants will visit the Hastings Natural History Reserve in Carmel Valley, with its brittle, moisture-starved underbrush, and, among other activities, explore in a journal humankind’s connection to water.

“We thought this was the best way to push the message out there that we are water,” Ms. Berthoin said.

At her home in Carmel Valley, Ms. Berthoin’s water concerns are more practical. Though she has installed drought-tolerant and native-plant landscaping and seven tanks to collect rainwater, she worries about the two ponds on her seven-acre property.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen with the ponds,” she said. “They’re not getting what they need.”

The recent storms across the state aren’t likely to squelch the soul-searching over proper drought landscaping, said Mitsugu Mori, the owner of the Seaside Garden Center. “Even if it rained every single day until April,” Mr. Mori said, “we don’t have enough water.”

Grass has slowly been disappearing from California yards for several years, especially in cities that offer rebates to encourage homeowners to uproot (Ms. Muñoz paid for part of her lawn conversion this way). Menlo Park, for instance, has a Lawn Be Gone program that gives homeowners up to $3,000 if they convert their grass lawns to water-efficient landscapes. But the drought has sped up changes to the landscape, as homeowners opt for more eco-friendly, cost-saving options.

Kathleen Brenzel, the garden editor of Sunset magazine, who lives in Menlo Park, said several of her neighbors have recently pulled up their lawns, planting meadows or succulents instead. “I’ve seen blends of shrubs that bloom in spring and ornamental grasses,” Ms. Brenzel said. “They catch the sunlight in their wispy blades.”

Ms. Brenzel, who has a native plant garden at her house, featured a section on drought landscaping in the “Sunset Western Garden Book of Landscaping,” out last month, which she edited.

“Streamscaping,” one of the techniques the book spotlights, is a favorite of Christine Watten, a designer at Hill and Dale Landscapes, the firm that converted Ms. Muñoz’s yard. “We do a lot of dry stream beds with rock,” Ms. Watten said. “It’s like an Arroyo Seco look. It gives dimensionality to the garden, focal points.”

Ms. Watten also likes native ground covers like coast buckwheats and low-growing manzanitas, which have an expansive green look.

What’s happening as a result of the water shortage, Ms. Brenzel said, “is that front lawns are getting more interesting, and saving water at the same time.”

How interesting front yards become, however, depends largely on what is seen as acceptable landscaping. And even in the midst of a drought of biblical proportions, longstanding ideas hold sway.

When Cory Wechsler and her partner, Alicia Gilbreath, decided to start a water-saving competition in their Oakland neighborhood, announcing in an email last month that “a brown lawn is the new cool,” they were surprised by the reaction. The couple had led by example: in the front yard of their duplex they planted a vegetable garden and fruit trees, and added another vegetable patch and a chicken coop in the back. What grass remained had gone unwatered for more than a year.

“You just have this brown piece of land,” Ms. Wechsler said. “With a little rain, it’s almost as green as anyone else’s lawn.”

But their neighbors showed little enthusiasm for letting their own lawns go brown, she said. “Instead of getting excited, people felt like we were attacking their green lawns,” she said. “I do think people place value in the idea that something is healthy when it’s green, and when it’s brown, it’s not so.”

The couple have since reframed the competition, downplaying the brown-lawn aspect and focusing instead on other ways of decreasing water use, from installing a gray-water system to planting drought-tolerant flowers and herbs like rosemary.

“There’s no judgment,” Ms. Wechsler said. “Let’s just talk about the decisions each of us are willing to make.”

Soon, though, homeowners with a traditional green lawn may not have a choice. An average of 50 to 60 percent of a household’s water consumption goes to outdoor use, which includes the landscape, said Mr. Ingels, the horticulture adviser. He envisions a future in which lawns go dormant in winter, and possibly even in summer, if watering is not allowed.

“The water bills are going up,” Mr. Ingels said. “I think we’re going to start seeing more and more people opt for a brown lawn. I think it could become more traditional.”

In Southern California, where water reserves are in (marginally) greater supply than in the northern part of the state, many homeowners have not yet reached a lawn reckoning, said Peter Eberhard, a designer with the Los Angeles firm GDS Designs.

“We’re not at that point in the ’70s when people are draining their pools and in panic mode,” Mr. Eberhard said. “The trend here is about reducing the size of the lawn.”

He has torn up plenty of grass in the last few years, but that was motivated less by his clients’ desire to conserve water, he said, than their requests for “outdoor rooms” focused around barbecue pits, kitchens and entertaining areas.  

“People want to use their outside areas as an exterior house,” he said. “That’s a huge feature in almost every house we do now.”

Tine Nilsen wanted a similar kind of hardscape at her house in the Mar Vista section of Los Angeles, and over a year ago hired Mr. Eberhard’s firm. But she was concerned that removing the grass would create a barren-looking landscape.

“I wanted a modern feel and low maintenance,” Ms. Nilsen said. “What I didn’t want was for it to feel very desert-y.”

Mr. Eberhard used granite and mulch with new hedging and minimal low-water plants in the backyard, and in the front yard planted beds of succulents that are hand-watered periodically and native low-water shrubs, along with a few trees. “The little bushes are very lush and green,” Ms. Nilsen said. “But not so heavy that they cover everything.” And her new landscaping, which is fed by a drip irrigation system, consumes a quarter of the water her lawn did, she said.

Despite the drought, few people in Ms. Nilsen’s neighborhood have followed suit. Not yet, anyway.

Californians have a complicated, ambivalent relationship with water and, like much of the rest of America, a deep-seated allegiance to their grass lawns. If Ms. Nilsen needs any proof of that, all she has to do is step outside in the morning and look up and down her street, where the sprinklers are all working furiously at keeping her neighbors’ grass green.

Going Brown

With summer on its way, and tighter water restrictions likely, more Californians may soon decide that grass isn’t green enough, and opt instead for a different kind of landscape. Here are a few basics for installing a drought-tolerant garden.

WHEN TO UPROOT Even drought-tolerant plants require water to get established. If there is mandatory rationing, it may be best to let the lawn go brown and wait until fall, said Kathleen Brenzel, garden editor of Sunset magazine. Putting down newspaper around the edges and topping it with mulch will kill the lawn after three to four months. “That’s a summer project, something you can do to prep for fall,” Ms. Brenzel said.

COST To replace grass with drought-tolerant plants and inexpensive hardscaping usually runs $10 to $12 a square foot, said Tim Hill, an owner of Hill and Dale Landscapes in Monterey, Calif. More-elaborate plantings or masonry work will raise the price. Mr. Hill suggested avoiding the “instant look” and planting less. It may take a few years for the yard to fill out, but it will bring costs down. Synthetic grass is another option. Marianna Mori, of the Seaside Garden Center on the Monterey Peninsula, said her company charges $14 a square foot, which includes installation.

MAINTENANCE The amount of watering required should be significantly reduced — to one to three days a week, maximum, for drought-tolerant or native plants, down from three to four days a week for a typical lawn, said Peter Eberhard of GDS Designs in Los Angeles. And “it can even be less depending on the plant selection,” he said.

The New York Times, March 14, 2014