How to Kill Your Lawn and Help the Planet

The American Dream has long included the broad and verdant brushstrokes of a manicured lawn. Tidy plots of green grass, or turf, were so essential to the 20th-century suburban landscape that by 2006, lawn was the largest irrigated "crop" in the United States, according to a 2005 NASA study. But as drought persists across the country, and more homeowners and land care professionals have wised up to the ecologically destructive maintenance requirements of turf—from the toxic chemicals dumped on it to gas-spewing mowers and blowers used on it—those monolithic expanses of grass are giving way to more sustainable and eye-catching landscapes.