Schizoid Lawn Dilemma, Part II

The Environmental Protections Agency estimates that 70 million pounds of active pesticide ingredient (the vast part of each bag you buy, the filler, isn't even counted in that total) is used each year by Americans to treat their 40 million acres of precious turf. In pursuit of what amounts to a living Astroturf -- unreasonably perfect in every way, please, without a weed or blemish -- we spend $6.9 billion a year (1991 figures) on do-it-yourself products alone, says the nonprofit National Gardening Association in Vermont. And we spend lots more hiring professionals to do the work for us, too.

Chemical-free lawncare is being touted as being to the 90s what recycling was to the 80s -- the thing to do, the savvy way to handle things. Exciting developments like safer remedies for problems and grass breeds that grow slower, greener and healthier naturally, are making a "green" -- as in environmental -- lawn possible.

Around the country, forward-thinking communities are testing bans on lawncare's worse aspects: forbidding loud, gas-guzzling mowers; outlawing pesticides and herbicides or requiring those who do use them to post prominent signs that say so; severely limiting watering, and, in the most dramatic cases of all, making the installation of a traditional lawn against the law altogether.

Of course, there's nothing so soft underfoot, or so nice to lie on, as a well tended lawn. On beautiful summer days, I wouldn't trade mine in for anything -- even the smell of fresh-cut grass pleases me, filed as it is into my deepest memory as far back as my first summer, I suppose.

But my lawn is smaller than it once was, and shrinking every season in favor of groundcovers, flower and shrub gardens, and even a patch of meadow. I haven't fed it or limed it in eight years. I've also given up my images of perfection, and learned to live with some weeds. Five to ten percent weeds doesn't warrant chemical warfare, the new thinking goes, so I just mow them and enjoy their fresh green color in the crazy quilt that is my lawn. When I get up from my nap on this pleasing outdoor carpet -- clover, crabgrass and all -- I'll dig out a few dandelions in the name of a beautiful, but chemical-free, future.

- Margaret Roach