00:01So when you think about Miami, you probably think about neon lights, nightclubs and cocaine.
00:05Materialism and bad cocaine, I was going to say, exactly.
00:08It's all like what can we consume and what can we destroy.
00:10That's what Kill Your Lawn is trying to get at.
00:13Like trying to get people, you know, instead of fighting where they live, you're becoming a part of it.
00:17Yeah, so I want to do a restoration of what would have originally been here,
00:20which would have been Cyprus waterline and then trees transitioning to a pine rockland.
00:24This sort of feature in a way anyone who drives by can see what would have been here.
00:28So the dominant species would be the cypresses and then the slash pine.
00:32Yeah, absolutely.
00:34Let's go check out what you've got in your yard.
00:35Let's do it.
00:36I'm going to be honest, you know, when I learned that the Golden Girls wasn't actually filmed in Miami,
00:40it was just set to take place, I was a little disappointed.
00:43Charlie's done his homework on this one, identifying which species contribute positively to the local ecology.
00:49These are staying.
00:50It's a gumbo limbo right there.
00:51A gumbo thing.
00:52And then we have some cabbage palms here. This is our state palm.
00:57So what are you going to do when you get rid of the lawn?
01:01Everything on the ground is going to get trashed.
01:04All these bushes, those non-native palms are all going to go.
01:07We also have an invasive fishtail fern.
01:10That's really gone out of control.
01:11So we're going to wipe all this out.
01:13And the idea is, think about this as a place you approach from the water, a native freshwater canal.
01:17So it's cypress along the waterline, which really helps.
01:19Like a cypress thing.
01:20Yeah, absolutely.
01:21The cypress also prevent the erosion. They maintain the thick roots.
01:24Yeah.
01:25They're salt tolerant in case we get brackish water coming up in a hurricane or as sea level rises.
01:29So they're really, really resilient species.
01:31And anyone who's worried about flooding on their property, an adult cypress can drink 800 gallons of water in one day.
01:36Whoa!
01:37Yeah, so it's a great way to reduce runoff.
01:39We're kind of using the landscape to act as like a large sponge.
01:43You know, if you pour water over a large sponge, it's not going to run off.
01:46It's actually going to soak into the sponge versus if you pour water on a big concrete slab, it's going to run right off.
01:51And all that wasted potential moisture.
01:54Charlie is a cypress planting pioneer in Miami who's not afraid of taking on City Hall.
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