How the Lawn Became a Bully, and Why Your Garden Deserves Better
By Steve Mydelski | Natchez Glen House
The Lawn as a Path
I love a beautiful lawn.
I love it as a path—to take me from the daffodils to the peonies, to the dahlias in summer, to the asters in fall, and finally to the hellebores in winter. A lawn, when used intentionally, can be just that: a soft green invitation, a grounding element in a living garden. I like throwing out some ryegrass seed, mixing in perennial and annual blends, maybe even a touch of zoysia in a Southern garden. Sometimes I’ll mix in a bit of Carex in a tough-to-germinate strip.
But somewhere along the way, the lawn got out of control.
The lawn became a bully.
How the Lawn Bullied the Garden
Anything that grew in the lawn and wasn’t the lawn got labeled a weed. If it looked different—if it was an insect-friendly wildflower, or a stray seedling of something useful—it was pulled, chopped, sprayed, or worse, burned. If it didn’t fit the narrative of symmetry, monoculture, and striped perfection, it was erased.
And somewhere along the way, the lawn became the villain in our story.
The Business of Grass
A friend once said to me, “There’s a lot of people making money in your industry.”
I nearly fell out of my chair.
Because the only part of the landscaping and gardening industry that’s consistently profitable is the lawn.
Let me break it down for you:
• The average suburban lawn? High maintenance.
• It needs mowing two to four times a month.
• That means buying a mower—or hiring someone else who did.
• Then comes the fertilizer, the herbicides, the pre-emergents.
• And then the upsell: the “premium package” from some chemical company with a name like GreenTruth or EcoPro Solutions.
Here’s the thing: that “pre-emergent” herbicide you’re paying for? It’s a petrochemical sludge—often derived from petroleum refining, bonded with a compound like Trifluralin. It sticks to your soil. It makes it infertile. It kills anything trying to germinate that isn’t grass.
I’ve seen entire crops ruined by it.
I’ve had a clematis variety melt from it firsthand.
So let me say this plainly:
We are literally paying companies to kill our soil.
Even If You Don’t Care About the Environment…
Maybe you don’t care about monarch butterflies.
Maybe you’re not losing sleep over soil ecology.
But let me ask you this:
Have you ever seen a flower bloom from a lawn?
Have you ever harvested a squash or tomato from it?
Has it ever brought you anything except a receipt and another Saturday lost?
• Lawn service: $150–$500/month
• Cub Cadet mower: $1,200–$2,500
• Chemicals and fertilizer: recurring
• And still… no flowers.
Somewhere along the way, we all got scammed.
That path of grass became the whole story.
A Personal Turning Point
Years ago, I was sitting on my Cub Cadet, mowing my then two-acre Bermuda lawn. I had the thought:
What am I doing?
I was mowing the most expensive thing my wife and I had ever bought—our home and land—over and over again. I wasn’t planting. I wasn’t growing. I was maintaining… nothing.
And I’ve never been more grateful for a single intrusive thought. Because that’s the moment that led to Natchez Glen.
I Killed My Lawn. And I’ve Never Looked Back.
Since that day, no one has killed their lawn more than me.
I’ve turned over 2.5 acres of grass into gardens.
And while others launched campaigns and hashtags about “killing the lawn,” I was already deep in the work—quietly building garden beds filled with daffodils, iris, peonies, asters, hellebores, and native plants that hum and buzz and flutter with life.
I’ve walked barefoot on soft spring ryegrass paths that wind through all of it.
And not one single time have I regretted the decision.
Not once.
The Lawn Wasn’t Always King
It’s worth remembering: the suburban lawn is a recent invention.
Not long ago, the ideal landscape was a productive one. Gardens. Orchards. Farms. Not symmetrical rows of turf requiring $200 of nitrogen and a water bill you didn’t want to open.
The lawn didn’t always rule.
It was sold to us.
Sold to us by chemical companies.
Sold to us by landscape contractors building maintenance contracts, not beauty.
Sold to us by HOAs, by city planners, by regional ordinances that confused uniformity for value.
Where Do You Start?
You just start.
Cut out a section.
Spray it. Solarize it. Sheet mulch it.
Turn your path of lawn into a garden bed.
There are plenty of resources right here on the Natchez Glen blog to walk you through it. But know this: the payoff is real.
• Fresh cut flowers in your kitchen
• Monarchs and hummingbirds in your yard
• A barefoot walk through soft ryegrass, headed toward blooming peonies
You can have all of that.
On a quarter acre. On a city lot. Even on a strip by your driveway.
The only thing standing between you and that garden is a story we’ve all been told about what “belongs” in a landscape.
Final Thought: Don’t Let the Lawn Bully You
Look—there will be weeds.
There will always be weeds.
But attacking them relentlessly like you’re in some chemical arms race is foolish. It’s foolish economically. It’s foolish spiritually.
Instead, I encourage you to look at your lawn as a path.
From here to there. From present to future. From what was to what can be.
But don’t let it bully you.
Don’t let the lawn be the villain of your story.
Because I promise you:
There is something better on the other side.