But imagine, in addition, more organic lawns made of pollinator-friendly grasses peppered with clovers, violets, chamomile<br />and other flowering lawn plants; imagine short green turf replaced in places by a diverse wealth of native plants bringing new colors, scents and blooms.<br />I still see the wide expanses of green, but I also see the high cost of keeping these nonnative monocultures growing: the wasted water, the overuse of fossil-fuel fertilizers, the threats to human<br />and environmental health, even to the health of our dogs.<br />For example, microbial ecologists using DNA sequencing have found — in New York City’s Central Park<br />— a diversity of soil organisms equal to anything they might have found in a tropical rain forest.<br />But the chemicals we pump into our lawns kill off the upper level of these microorganisms, which then requires us to use synthetic fertilizer to do their job — some 90 million pounds of fertilizer<br />and more than 75 million pounds of pesticides per year.
