The Greatest Yard Sale: Trading in Your Grass for a Garden by Garry Menendez

[NOTE: Local landscape designer and former UT professor Garry Menendez shared the following handout with participants at his March 8, 2025, presentation at Stanley’s Greenhouse. Enjoy!]

The American love affair with lawn is a touchy subject. There are those who say they want “low maintenance” and then spend so much time on or behind a mower making much noise and doing our air or environment no favors.

 Gardening is most satisfying when you bypass the monotony and routine for a little fun and experimentation. I see gardens like a painter’s canvas - you can fill it with anything you can imagine, and shape your ideas into something bold, unexpected, and inspiring. A mini-meadow in your garden can be more than just an apparent chunk of missed mowing. These collections of different small species and plant communities can positively contribute to both the health and appearance of the garden. Read on to discover how a mini-meadow can add to your garden.

Increase Biodiversity

Most gardens strive for uniformity, both in terms of design and plant species.

Naturally, this limits the number of plant species you can incorporate in your garden and can make the landscape look a bit one-dimensional. A mini-meadow can introduce dozens of plant species in a compact space in ways that a typical garden will not..

Attract Wildlife

A mini-meadow that contains a diverse mix of plants and will attract a mix of wildlife. Tall grasses and perennials will attract hummingbirds and butterflies, among other critters. I’m sure I will step on a few toes here but I LIKE seeing bunnies pop out of our little thicket of wildness.

Room to Experiment

Here is another important benefit of mini-meadows and perhaps, my favorite one - they give you room to experiment with your gardening. For example, you might want to try adding a particular plant to your garden, but you are not sure how well it will do or how it will look. A mini-meadow gives you a defined space in which to try your experiment. If it works out, you can add more of that species throughout your garden. If it does not work, no big deal – go for other choices.

Simple Beginnings

Perhaps the easiest way to begin a mini-meadow is to just flag or mark off the area and call it your “no mow zone”. It is surprising just how many different plants besides “grass” this practice will encourage. Two key points to make before going on:

EDGE: If you just let your yard “go” with no rhyme or reason, there’s a good chance you will lose some friends or have one of those wanna-be cops or HOA (Homeowner’s Association) folks banging on your door. However, if you keep this wild area in check by drawing boundaries and maintaining a controlled edge, you can get away with just about anything, especially if you put up a “Just helping our honeybees” sign.

INVASIVES: If you start a mini-meadow and start to notice some undesirables pop in (privet, Bermuda grass, and/or Japanese honeysuckle) it will be best to try to yank these guys out before they take up permanent residency. It is not hard to identify this stuff, so as Harry Potter’s teacher would say, “Stay vigilant!” 

SLOPES

One of the best places to try a “no-mow” or mini-meadow on your property would be an area that really should not be mown in the first place, such as a steep slope. Just imagine the smile on your insurance guy’s face when you tell him you are not defying gravity (ok, get that song out of you head) and tilting your rider on two wheels as you try to lower the blades of grass from 4 inches to 3 inches. Another approach to minimizing your mowing on these slopes might be to plant what I call “the big floppies”. These are plants that eat up a fair amount of square footage like forsythia, oakleaf hydrangea, bottlebrush buckeye, and deciduous holly. The beauty of using plants such as these is that the grass beneath them eventually goes away as they drop their leaves and self-mulch.

FROM ISLANDS TO PENINSULAS

I’m sure you’ve all seen or perhaps even have small collections of plants which are grouped together in one bed with no grass in between them. “Islands” is what I grew up calling them. Imagine if you allowed these to grow even larger and became….wait for it….PENINSULAS! Yep. You can eliminate even more mowing if you would just plant more stuff! Big surprise there. Above is an example of becoming more adventurous in one’s yard.

As those famous Looney Tunes cartoons would always say, That’s all folks!

 Visit Garry’s website:  https://ahomeforyourgnome.com/ for more information!