Aussies are ditching lawns for eco-friendly gardens

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Now, if you look around new suburbs and developments, you'll probably notice the great Aussie lawn is under threat. There are several reasons, block sizes are shrinking, there's more focus on being water wise and maintaining a lawn can be hard work.

Transcript

00:00 There are a couple of reasons around this. Firstly, just from the idea of the lawn that

00:05 we kind of all grew up with, that idea of the beautiful green carpet. It's water intensive

00:11 and in a city like Perth, for example, very dry city, that equates to gigalitres of drinkable

00:17 water going onto our lawns for maintenance only, for aesthetic reasons only every year.

00:22 There's that side, pesticides, and we've got to encourage more diversity in our ecologies

00:26 and lawns as we know them tend to do the opposite of that and tend to sort of become a monoculture.

00:31 So from that side, they're the reasons we should be thinking differently about what

00:34 ground cover might look like. Very different image to the kind of lawn we all grew up with.

00:39 I like my lawn a lot. I'm going to put that out there straight away. I do spend a lot

00:43 of time on it, but it is a pain as we were just chatting about before we got this segment

00:47 started. Because in Canberra, where I live, it's usually too hot, too cold, and it's rarely

00:52 just right for lawn growing conditions. And some people around my area have been putting

00:57 in fake lawns. Some of them look quite good, but you don't like them either, do you?

01:02 No, this is the surprise to me. I thought fake lawns or AstroTurf was the villain in

01:09 all of this. But it turns out that it's real lawns as well are sustainably troubling or

01:14 problematic. But yes, no, the AstroTurf, the fake lawns, they have all the same and even

01:19 worse environmental credentials. So the problem I see there is I was standing on a lot recently

01:25 in the outskirts of Melbourne, seeing a whole street of AstroTurf lie down the footpath.

01:30 And for two metres by the width of the block, that is what is being sort of laid out in

01:35 a lot of our new subdivisions. That's very concerning.

01:38 It's hot, isn't it?

01:39 That's right. It takes the heat, it keeps the heat to the point where in a very hot

01:43 summer's day, you can't actually walk on it.

01:45 I've walked on it before and burned my feet next to a footpath. Right. OK. So if you don't

01:50 have a lawn, you can't put in AstroTurf, or at least you shouldn't be. What should you

01:54 put in instead?

01:55 Now, this is where it gets interesting, because there is a real challenge to landscape architects,

02:00 designers, architects, all the rest who are now trying to rethink what ground cover might

02:04 look like. So things like hardier walkable surfaces like dichondria or even mint, for

02:11 example, are being considered as viable alternatives to keep a kind of a space that's open, that's

02:17 green. But there's other trends to rewilding more meadow like types of lawn spaces. So

02:23 the alternatives are definitely there and we should not be sacrificing our green space.

02:28 It's just that the nature of that green space is changing.

02:30 OK. There will be some people watching this this morning concerned that the great Aussie

02:35 backyard is under threat, sporting matches. What on earth will this trend mean for Australia's

02:40 cricket team if we don't have backyard lawns? If we didn't have lawns, though, do you think

02:45 we might appreciate our local parks and sporting fields a bit more like you see in other nations

02:50 around the world where housing is a lot smaller?

02:52 Look, I think that's kind of the silver lining to all of this. I realise how difficult an

02:58 image this is to kind of give up the idea of the Aussie backyard. And I'm not advocating

03:02 for that at all. But the reality is that those spaces are being sort of designed away in

03:08 our new subdivisions and so on. Lot sizes are shrinking, house sizes are staying the

03:11 same or getting bigger. So they're kind of already going away, which means then the value

03:16 of our public parks, those common green spaces that we all have, that's even more valuable.

03:21 We kind of know they're precious, but I think we have to sort of look at them with fresh

03:25 eyes and think actually they are what for most people growing up in the next generations

03:29 of Australia, they will be the only source of real green usable space that they can get

03:34 to.

03:35 Well Anthony Burke, I really enjoyed your article on the ABC website this week. If you

03:38 haven't seen it, you should go and look at it. Thought provoking. Not sure whether I'm

03:42 ready to give up my - it's only a little patch of lawn - I'm not sure whether I'm ready to

03:45 give it up.

03:46 Fair enough.

03:47 Totally honest. But it's a good thing to think about.

03:48 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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