Researchers Liz Anna Kozik and Becky Barak at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s lawn alternatives test site, photographed in October 2024. (Patty Wetli / WTTW News)
Illinois, along with much of the rest of the Midwest, might look like corn and soybean country.
But it’s really lawn country.
There are 50 million total acres of lawn in the U.S. — or three times the amount of land the nation devotes to cultivating corn — covering everything from yards to corporate campuses, golf courses to highway medians. A good portion of this grass is regularly watered, mowed and chemically treated in pursuit of turf perfection.
Why?
“In a lot of places, there’s turf grass ‘just because,’” said Becky Barak, a scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Negaunee Institute for Plant Conservation Science and Action. “Just because mowers are mowing. They keep mowing, and things just stay turf grass even when they don’t have to be.”
While turf has long been the country’s default landscape setting, there’s a growing push for a shift away from a monoculture of, say, Kentucky bluegrass to more environmentally friendly lawn alternatives.
Ecologists argue that diverse plantings would be better for pollinators, better for stormwater absorption and better for soil than turf, among other benefits. Conservation-minded homeowners have responded by smothering their lawns with cardboard, tarps or other turf killers and replacing the grass with perennials — in Chicago, “prairie” plantings are a popular choice (“prairie” being a catch-all descriptor for a curated selection of native plants).
What’s been missing is the data to support these claims and actions.
“It’s interesting that everyone’s talking about it (lawn alternatives) and no one is really measuring it in a controlled, quantified way,” said Lauren Umek, project manager for the Chicago Park District’s natural areas. “Not very many people are actually doing controlled, replicated experiments on the sort of suite of landscape choices that you have” — a suite that runs the gamut from turf to tallgrass prairie.
Barak and Umek, who met in grad school, have stepped in to fill the data gap with “Rethinking Lawns,” a research project that’s testing and analyzing the viability of various lawn alternatives. The collaboration brings together the Botanic Garden, Park District and University of Michigan-Flint, where a third grad school pal, Rebecca Tonietto, whose areas of study include native bees, also contributes to the work.
“We were all thinking about these things separately, so it was very exciting when we started thinking about them together,” Barak said.
“What we see as our contribution is trying to get at the actual data, trying to be able to say, ‘If you want to support pollinators, this is what we think you should plant. If you want to absorb stormwater, these are some great options for you,’” she continued. “A lot of what’s out there is what we think should be best, just given what we know about these (native) plants. But we really want to be able to put some data behind it.”
A mini-meadow test plot at the Chicago Botanic Garden has more diverse species than a turf lawn, but it’s also taller. Will people like it as an alternative? (Patty Wetli / WTTW News)
The project has been steadily gaining momentum over the past three to four years and in August received its biggest boost yet in the form of a five-year, $1.76 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
“It was a really amazing opportunity for us because this was a grant that funded research and conservation collaborations,” Barak said. “Sometimes we think about the National Science Foundation more funding ‘science for science’s sake’ and we’re very much applied scientists, where we want to know what is the end goal for conservation, what is the on-the-ground impact of the things that we’re studying.”
The infusion of money will allow the team to expand the project’s scope and to hire additional staff, including Liz Anna Kozik, who’s played a key role on the project to date and now joins as a full-time member.
“Most science, you can get funding for two years, maybe three if you’re lucky, and then you sort of have to move on,” Umek said. “Five years of funding is absolutely critical to be able to see this through.... I think a lot of people are looking at us to find out what are the answers.”
But first came the questions.
The Chicago Park District is exploring areas where turf lawn isn’t serving a purpose, like alongside a paved biking/walking path, and could be replace with an alternative that provides more ecosystem benefits. A mix of native grasses, sedges and perennials is being tested in one such area along the 312 RiverRun in California Park. (Patty Wetli / WTTW News)
For the record, Rethinking Lawns isn’t proposing the wholesale replacement of every inch of turf from coast to coast. As the project’s title says, it’s about rethinking what lawns could be, in addition to or besides turf.
Concepts like “No Mow May” are a step in this direction, “inviting people to see a very different aesthetic of what their lawn looks like,” while acknowledging there’s a time and place for turf, Kozik said.
“We don’t want anybody to play soccer on a sedge meadow,” Barak said. “But there’s a lot of places that are turf grass lawns that nobody is playing soccer on, nobody is sitting and gathering on. It’s not being actively used.”
Case in point, Umek said, are the grassy embankments wedged between DuSable Lake Shore Drive and the roadway’s on- and off-ramps.
“No one’s doing anything on that lawn,” Umek said one recent morning, pointing to a strip where Lawrence Avenue meets the drive. “That’s not a good or safe place for anyone to play. Also, mowing that? That can’t be fun — on a slope close to traffic?”
Not only is this particular space not doing anything for people, it’s not doing anything for wildlife or the environment in general. But at the same time, the area isn’t a good candidate for a full-blown habitat restoration project.
“It probably couldn’t be a tallgrass prairie ... it would be a safety issue in terms of visibility,” Umek said. “What should it be?”
This is the essence of what Rethinking Lawns is investigating: exploring solutions that could split the difference between turf and prairie, improving on the ecosystem services of the former while tempering some of the negatives of the latter, primarily height.
“There’s a huge diversity of native plants in our area, and we are trying to select the ones that can fill some of the same aesthetic and use roles as turf grass does, with adding more diversity and more native plants,” Barak said.
The Chicago Park District doesn’t chemically manage most of its lawns, and it shows.
Instead of pristine turf, the district’s lawns are a melange of grasses, legumes (like white clover and black medic) and various other plants including purslane, plantain, chicory and dandelions.
It’s a borderline weedy jumble, Umek said, but on the plus side, it’s also diverse, and therein lies the germ of an idea.
These plant communities — what Umek said could be considered a “crappy, non-native prairie” — are thriving, with little if any care. Is there a way, she wondered, to intentionally replicate their completely unintentional success by drawing on native plants from the same families?
That’s the premise behind Rethinking Lawns’ test plots at the park district’s Uptown Coastal Natural Area, located just west of DuSable Lake Shore Drive, between Lawrence and Montrose avenues.
Each test patch at the site consists of a cluster of native plants that mimics the composition of the district’s existing lawn: 80% of a plot consists of a single species of native grass or sedge, “dappled” with 20% native legumes and forbs, which is a fancy word for flowering plants, Umek explained.
Instead of, say, a weedy mishmash of crab grass, purslane and white clover, a test plot might be planted with native common wood sedge, wild petunia and prairie smoke, among others.
In this early phase of the project, Umek is looking for which plants can hang and which can’t in Chicago’s less-than-hospitable soil, a rare opportunity to test horticulture applications in an urban setting.
“If you read any ecology textbook, everything that everyone learns is developed outside of the city. All of the ecological rules don’t include cities proper,” Umek said, “and our conditions are very fundamentally different…. You have clay and rocks, it’s not great, it’s not a prairie soil. So what can grow well in this?”
Test plots at Chicago Botanic Garden run the gamut from turf to tallgrass prairie. Some look more like traditional lawns than others. (Patty Wetli / WTTW News)
In suburban Glencoe, at the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Rethinking Lawns team is testing a wider range of lawn alternatives than at Uptown Coastal. Plots range from traditional turf as the experiment’s control, continuing all the way up to tallgrass prairie, with fescue mixes, microclover lawns and mini meadows in between. The plants have also been placed in far richer soil, which allows for comparison with Uptown.
“This is fancy soil and it’s incredibly babied,” said Kozik, “so we’ve been seeing some interesting things” — surprisingly not always in the botanic garden’s favor.
One example has been the behavior of pussytoes (Antennaria plantaginifolia), a velvet-leaved native groundcover that bombed when planted at the garden.
“That doesn’t mean it’s not a good plant,” Kozik said. “It means in this particular wet, rich condition, it’s too much. They are a plant that likes it a little dry and likes it a little sandy, so it should do fantastic at Uptown.”
And, indeed, it has.
One of the trickiest needles for the team to thread has been the issue of aesthetics: The plants need to perform well in terms of robustness and ease of management, but they have to look appealing, too, in the context of a lawn, which adds a layer of subjectivity to an otherwise objective survey.
“Everyone’s going to have a different opinion about what these look like,” Umek said.
Purple lovegrass (Eragrostis spectabilis) is one such plant the team suspects will be polarizing. A colorful foamy grass when in flower — “Like a fluffy boa,” Umek said — it turns brown fairly quickly. Some might look at the sun hitting spent stems and appreciate the golden glow, while others might think it looks like a dried-up failure.
When Umek brought her father to Uptown Coastal for a tour, his reaction to purple lovegrass (post-flowering) was, she said, “‘That’s on purpose? I would have pulled it.’ Good to know, Dad.”
One trait that’s easier to quantify is height, which the research team has homed in on as a primary consideration for lawn alternatives.
Eight-foot-tall big bluestem — the king of tallgrass prairie grasses — wouldn’t be appropriate right up against a running path, Barak said. And indeed, plants in the botanic garden’s prairie test plot have drooped onto the adjacent sidewalk, which is a common complaint about tallgrass natives in residential settings.
Homeowners associations frequently impose height requirements on plants, as do many municipalities, and the Rethinking Lawns team is taking that into account with its test plots, while also attempting to maximize ecosystem services.
Milkweed, for example, is vital to monarch butterflies, but varieties such as common milkweed can get quite tall. So test plots feature butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata), which have less imposing footprints.
“The whorled milkweed we were unsure about but we wanted to test it,” Umek asked. “This is one that gets taller, but it’s daintier, so again, we’re thinking, ‘Is it the height that matters?’ Is it chunkiness? What are the physical aesthetic characteristics that make a native plant ‘OK’ for a lawn-like application?’”
And more to the point, do these shorter plants provide the same environmental bang as their taller counterparts? This in-between — not a turf lawn but not a prairie — could be a sweet spot, Umek said, or not.
“It could be that this doesn’t work. It could 100% be one of the data conclusions we come to is ... in-between doesn’t do anything. I kind of hope it’s not,” she said, “but you’re not supposed to have hopes when you’re a scientist.”
The Chicago Park District doesn’t chemically treat its lawns, and as a result, the turf is already a mix of species (top), but they’re non-native. Alternative lawn treatments (bottom) are similarly diverse but feature native plants with more ecosystem benefits. (Patty Wetli / WTTW News)
With the help of a group of research assistants, the team is collecting data for each test plot pertaining to key ecosystem benefits including the number of pollinator visits, water infiltration, and soil samplings to determine the carbon storage potential. Secondary variables include plant cover, bloom timing and whether the plants provide year-round greenery.
“A lot of prairie species look amazing in-season and then when they’re out of season, they’re either sticks or nothing,” said Kozik. “But we’re finding and paying close attention to what species actually stick around all winter so you don’t have a mud patch for your yard.”
Considering Chicago’s issues with urban flooding, particularly the problem of storm sewers becoming overwhelmed after heavy rains, Umek said she’s most excited to see whether lawn alternatives deliver on the promise of mitigating stormwater.
To measure stormwater absorption, the team uses equipment called infiltration rings, documenting the time it takes for a set amount of water to infiltrate soil.
“Basically you put a ring into the soil, you pour a set volume of water ... you sort of mimic rain falling in and how fast that water gets into the soil,” Umek explained.
At Uptown, where all plots have the same urban soil, any variation in infiltration would be attributed to the mix of plants.
“We can really start to answer that question: Does vegetation matter for stormwater?” Umek said.
Alternative lawn test plots take time to establish. On the left are plots at the Chicago Botanic Garden in 2023 and on the right in 2024. (Credit: Chicago Botanic Garden (l); Patty Wetli / WTTW News (r))
While it’s too soon for the Rethinking Lawns team to have drawn many conclusions about lawn alternatives — test plots take time to become established enough to collect meaningful data — they have learned some important lessons, particularly on the implementation front at early sites, which included Jackson Park and Marian Byrnes Park. (There’s an additional test site at Marquette Park.)
In terms of “do not try this at home,” Barak said the team would highly advise against roto-tilling for all those DIYers looking to convert their lawn into prairie or some other alternative.
“That’s what we did at our first site,” Barak said. “We tilled the soil and what we found was that it brought up a lot of weed seeds from the soil.”
Speaking of seeds, that’s been one of the most significant variables tested implementation-wise: Some experimental plots were started from plugs (baby plants), while others were sown from seed. At Uptown Coastal, plots with the same mix of plants — one from plugs, one from seed — were placed next to each other for direct side-by-side comparison.
Conventional wisdom says starting from seed is significantly cheaper than plugs, especially for large-scale installations. But two to three years into the experiment, many of the project’s seeded plots are either still barren or predominantly weeds.
“Maybe actually plugs are cheaper in the long run,” Kozik said. “No matter which treatment you’re going for, no matter how you want to remove your lawn, every process requires a period of ‘ugly.’ And your neighbors have to be OK with that, your HOA has to be OK with that, your township has to be OK with that. So a lot of things we’re finding is, ‘How can we narrow down that window of ‘ugly?’”
Umek has also seen plants behave far differently in test plots than she expected.
Coreopsis (Coreopsis palmata), for example, is one of the shorter native plants she selected for Uptown Coastal, typically growing 12 to 18 inches tall.
“Here, they’ve been monsters. It looks out of place,” Umek said.
Maintenance is another implementation issue: How much watering and weeding is required as plants establish themselves?
“We need to know that. Because if we’re going to try to recommend this Park District-wide, we need to make sure it’s something we can do, we can do well and that it works,” said Umek.
With the new grant funding, the team has more time to evaluate how plants perform over multiple growing seasons. It’s possible that the seeded plots could blossom beautifully in another year; it’s possible that in plots where all the species are currently playing well together, one could become aggressive and overtake the others; it’s possible early frontrunners succumb to a pest or disease.
“If things work, that’s amazing and if something doesn’t work the way we expect it to, we can change it,” Barak said. “It’s really a process where we’re learning as we go along.”
The public is invited to weigh in on the lawn alternatives at Uptown Coastal by accessing a survey. The project’s communications materials, including this signage, have been designed by Liz Anna Kozik. (Patty Wetli / WTTW News)
Next phases include continuing to fine-tune implementation. The Botanic Garden, for example, is investigating the establishment of native plants within an existing turf lawn.
“If we can figure this out, it wouldn’t have to be the major killing of the lawn in order to go to the next thing,” Barak said. “It could be a more gradual transition that would require less input from people who want to try this out.”
The team still hasn’t quite nailed its plant selection, with the search proving elusive for a short native perennial that flowers in fall. So the plan is to study the effects of mowing on taller perennials like New England aster.
“Things you think of as really large plants, if they’re mowed, they can actually flower really short and close to the ground,” Barak said. “That’s a thing we’re also thinking about: What are the options of plants that aren’t naturally so short but that may live that way and flower that way if they’re mowed?”
And then how often can you mow and force shorter blooms before you kill the plant? Umek added.
“So the answer to everything is ‘It’s very complicated,’” Kozik said.
What the team ultimately is working toward is the ability to provide people with choices that suit their needs and preferences — be they a groundskeeper at a university, a municipal department head in charge of parkways and roadsides, or an individual homeowner.
“Because of that unilateral idea of what a lawn is, people expect a unilateral (alternative lawn) solution. We’re leaning on the buffet, the cookbook, the menu of options,” Kozik said.
Even at that, recommending a buffet makes Kozik nervous. She said her biggest nightmare is having people blame the team whenever a plant dies or doesn’t work out as planned.
She’s joking, but only kind of. If one thing has become clear in the study of lawn alternatives, it’s that the solution isn’t going to be as simple as tossing down grass seeds or rolling out sod and, voila, lawn.
The purveyors of turf lawns have decades of experience behind them, and their seed mixes are all but foolproof. Expectations that experimental lawn alternatives will be able to match that same level of success are unrealistic.
“It will definitely take some trial and error,” Barak said. “It is more of a gardening approach.”
Alternative lawn won’t be for everyone, and it’s not a magic bullet to solve the biodiversity crisis, but rethinking those 50 million acres of turf is worth evaluating, the team said.
“Becky Tonietto, our bee person, she talks about, ‘The worst you do is make it better.’ The reality of lawn is that it’s a sterile landscape that’s doing a minimum, a little bit of heat reduction, a little bit of stormwater retention, but otherwise, it’s just taking up lawn labor and mower emissions,” Kozik said.
“Do we have the time to figure out the perfect (alternative)? I don’t know,” she said. “But what’s the harm in trying?”
Contact Patty Wetli: @pattywetli | (773) 509-5623 | [email protected]
