Would you be upset if your neighbor pulled up all their grass and planted miniature clover instead? It feels like the perfect answer to the “lawn problem” to me. Miniature clovers need mowing at most a couple of times per year. They don’t require adding chemical fertilizers in any but the absolute poorest soils. They feed endangered pollinators, and support nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil.
I really can’t think of a better answer, and I don’t understand why adoption hasn’t skyrocketed. I can only guess it’s because the lawns would look a little different texturally than we are accustomed to. And possibly HOAs wouldn’t allow it.
So I wonder 1) Would it upset you if a neighbor did it? If so, why? and 2) Can you think of any functional resaons against making the switch?
I just conducted an experiment. I am a “do whatever you want, just don’t scare the horses” guy. My wife, OTOH, gets pissed off if someone parks in front of our house.
I couldn’t care less, might actually like it. I asked my wife, who would object because “it wouldn’t look as nice.”
I wouldn’t mind at all (it’s hypothetical for me, we don’t have a neighbor). We have some in our yard. (my wife asked if we should eradicate it. I said no.)
But I can imagine a legitimate complaint might be because clover spreads. If your neighbor likes grass, your clover might cause some problems down the line.
I am the neighbor with the clover lawn and if it’s bothering anyone no one has said anything to me. One of my neighbors digs dandelions out of her yard by hand and the other used to have her yard treated but stopped after she got a dog.
Clover smells nice, is low maintenance, and the bees like it. Works for me.
I live on a corner, and I have the same issue with the parkway (the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street) along the side of my house. That street is fairly busy, and not only does it get directly exposed to lots of exhaust, but in the wintertime, the plows and salt trucks run constantly along that street when it snows, and I’m sure that the soil is pretty poor, as a result of all of that.
A decade ago, that whole section was ripped out when sewer work was done, and the parkway was sodded with nice grass; that grass made it through about two years, and was pushed out by crabgrass and clover, which don’t mind the poor soil.
I’ve been working on converting my lawns to clover since last fall. Things were looking good until spring. Part of it might be due to location (we’re just on the edge of the growing range for durana white clover), but I think I made a couple mistakes as well, that I will try and rectify come fall again.
Which is to say… no. No, I wouldn’t mind, and I think anyone who would mind is to worth catering to. It’s like the heckler’s veto of lawn care.
I’m generally opposed to monocultures when it comes to residential landscaping, but especially if that monoculture uses up a lot of water. I would prefer to see a yard of native plantings, but not much upsets me on the idea that it’s your yard, so you get to decide what to plant in it. OTOH, if you live next door to me, our yards abut each other, and you plant any of the spreading varieties of bamboo, well, I’m gonna bitch about it.
I wouldn’t have a problem with a neighbor having a clover lawn. My wife and I are thinking of trying some grass alternatives in the backyard, and then introducing them to the front lawn if we think they’ll work well there.
My WAG as to why clover lawns haven’t been widely adopted is that you don’t consider what you don’t see or know about.
I’ve never seen a clover lawn, and other than xeriscaping in arid climates (I’m in Maryland, so that doesn’t apply to me), I’ve not heard of alternatives to standard grass lawns until very recently, and I still have heard very little about them. If the local hardware store carries lawn clover, I haven’t seen it, but they carry a whole bunch of different kinds of grass.
Unless someone was really fed up with having to maintain their grass lawn, it’s hard to imagine that the idea of any other kind of lawn would cross their minds, and even then they’d be going: OK, where do I start? And most people who ask that question about doing something completely outside their experience and that of everyone around them, don’t start.
One of our neighbors when I was a kid / teen had a clover lawn. By far the best looking lawn up & down the block. And this was in an area where competitive lawn-growing was blood sport.
I would be very happy they planted natural clover to help recycle the air around me, rather than replacing the grass with artificial grass produced from plastic wasted on that purpose in a factory, or paving the front yard with concrete.
Unless it’s attracting wildlife that’s going to be a problem, couldn’t care less if someone does this. (I would prefer to not see a major upswing in the bee population, but that’s because I have a mild beesting allergy.)
My lawn’s a mix of whatever happens to grow there that survives erratic mowing and no other care. Clover and grass are both in there, along with a batch of other things. I live where my neighbors don’t much have to look at it, and the ones who do see it don’t appear to care.
Clover’s a nitrogen fixer. It’ll feed your grass, if you’ve got both. A lawn of straight clover may have other things move in; nature doesn’t much like monocropping.
There’s one where I live too, in fact I’m on the board. As long as it didn’t look like a bunch of random wild plants running wild, I doubt we’d have a problem. But on the scale of HOAs, we’re apparently pretty low-key.
I wouldn’t care in the slightest. And unless it happened to be one of my two next-door neighbors or the folks directly across the street, there’s a pretty good chance I’d never notice.
