Lawn Alternatives

A front lawn might seem a quick solution to a problem: Bare ground in front of house, roll out turf. The neighbors have some. The whole city is green with it, broken only by driveways and busy roads. But is this lawn carpet--rooted in the early 19th century American affection for English landscape parks--pretty or practical? Are people having fun on it?

To the latter, I would venture to say rarely, with the possible exception of backyards, and only if these people are under 12, or rich enough to own a football field. But in front, the grass just lies there, inert and empty, demanding water.

On the other hand, imagine a colorful, aromatic yard--humming with bees, hopping with birds, alive, enticing. The kind of spot you’d go out of your way to pass, hoping the owner might be weeding so you could ask the name of that fiery rose. Lawn alternatives might include small trees and low hedges to block views of whizzing cars. Paths wander through it, helping visitors decompress en route from street to front door, and plants wreath the way in welcome. Along these lines, the owners of the following gardens have found different ways to skip the lawn.

Beverly Hills

While naturalistic sweeps and flowery meadows might be perfect for a cottage, a grander place can require a stricter hand. But again, this doesn’t mean that one must plant--or keep--a lawn. Los Angeles landscape designer Chris Rosmini, who conceived Karen and David Sachs Beverly Hills garden, took her cues from their 1920s Italian-style house. “It’s beautiful, crisp, even a bit severe,” notes Rosmini, who found a vast turf field and some leggy bananas and birds of paradise in front when she arrived. “I saw a chance to set the beauty off by surrounding it with the order of a formal garden but keeping the lines soft,” she says. “The house would rise out of a froth of plants that you wouldn’t perceive as stiff or formal.”

In lieu of a lawn, she sketched a loose parterre, bounded along the sidewalk by a mounded row of Pittosporum crassifolium ‘Compactum’ shrubs. To the left of a wide paved entry walk, she edged two square planting beds, separated by a gravel path, with rosemary hedges, and she filled these compartments with spreading silver helichrysum, gaura and Mexican evening primrose. Then, instead of the formal urns and clipped shrubs you might expect as focal points, she brought in plain concrete pots spouting dwarf pampas grass. Some of the same plants reappear to the right of the walk. There, in a tapestry of grays and greens, they swirl around ‘Glacier’ ivy at the feet of an olive tree. Close by but curtained off by another hedge is the driveway, and alongside it, a functional scrap of lawn. Its purpose? To sweeten the first step from car to terra firma.

Monrovia

Neighbors still lounge on front porches in Monrovia, and Andree Matton has surrounded hers with a field of catmint, yarrow, lavender and succulents. In the spirit of the nearby foothills, Glendora landscape architect Rick Fisher helped Matton replace a turf lawn edged with daisies with plants appropriate to the hot, dry inland climate. Among those on her wish list were a few California natives such as manzanita, which Matton loves for its ruddy bark. But Fisher also found “garden-friendly” substitutes for many chaparral plants.

Aloes, for instance, stand in for yuccas, which were too tall and rangy for Matton’s 50-by-40-foot front plot. Similarly, ‘Goodwin Creek’ lavender keeps its compact shape and blooms longer than native sage or artemisia.

When Matton bought her 1925 California bungalow in the late ‘90s, iron fencing set off the porch, and the lawn, rife with palm seedlings from local street trees, sloped disconcertingly from right to left. Fisher designed a wooden porch rail in keeping with the house but sturdy enough in a pinch to serve as seating. Another garden seat tops the stone wall Fisher added along the drive to retain extra soil needed to level the lot.

From either perch, Matton has a clear view of her “very public outdoor room packed with show-offy colors and shapes. Everyone around here knows this house,” she says. “The orange gazanias all summer, the succulent blooms in winter, the bees and hummingbirds. A grass lawn is always the same. My garden is always changing.” Still, Matton is no slave to her garden’s grace. She says, “Instead of mowing on weekends, I spend an hour every few weeks clipping and tending. If I miss a couple of months, it only grows a little wilder.”

Atwater Village

People driving by Brigitte Pavich Echols’ Spanish bungalow in Atwater Village must have clapped and cheered as nutmeg geraniums, sages and ‘Pat Austin’ roses went into new beds on either side of her front path, replacing dry grass that Echols, a commercial stylist, had allowed to die. Instead of a space she hurried through as she entered or left her house, she wanted an inviting setting where cooking herbs and cutting flowers mixed and where a short hedge and well-placed trees would screen out the worst of city life.

Elysian Park garden designer Judy Kameon of Elysian Landscapes created four small flower beds--separated by two intersecting earthen walks--and packed them with orange and white roses, alstroemerias and Mediterranean, California and culinary sages. Around these, in keeping with the Mediterranean-style house, she tucked rosemary, lavender and convolvulus, adding agaves and aloes for their spiky shapes. Oregano and thyme fill in the gaps, magnolias flower near the street, and a hedge of ‘Little Ollie’ dwarf olives has knit together along the sidewalk, setting limits for local canines.

What pleases Echols beyond the snappy scenery is its eco-friendliness: The drought-tolerant plants are watered sparingly via drip irrigation and fed with organic compost only. In place of polluting lawn-care tools such as mowers and edgers, she uses hand pruners and cuts plants back herself, a seasonal rather than weekly job. But her rewards are constant--blooms to snip year-round, kitchen herbs, and a daily walk home through a garden.

Silver Lake

In Silver Lake, another Judy Kameon creation couldn’t be more different. The patch of ground, which sits directly on the street, needed planting to mitigate the fortress-like feel of the house, designed in the 1930s by R.M. Schindler. Given a hot western exposure, the plants had to be tough, and without the buffer of a sidewalk, they had to be sturdy enough to withstand incursions by dogs. But not just dogs, Kameon says: “Trash, thrown newspapers, car fumes. The frontyard is a brutal environment. And since it’s so exposed, it’s less fun to garden in, yet it has to look good year-round; it’s the face you present to the world.”

Kameon designed a visually graphic and virtually no-maintenance alternative for the owner. She chose a simple palette: ‘Yellow Wave’ flax, prostrate juniper, yellow-toothed Aloe saponaria and ‘Bush Dawn’ kangaroo paws, all in harmony with a lemon tree spilling over the front wall from an entry court. Even this tiny spot features seasonal fluctuations. The aloes flower in winter as the lemons begin to ripen. The fruit hangs on through spring, when the furry kangaroo paws bloom and carry the garden into summer. Fine-chipped gravel, used as groundcover, not only reduced the number of plants the bed required, but it also cools and insulates plant roots and adds polish to the composition.