Making a Lawn Really Green

摘要

The suburban lawn has become a symbol of community, personal identity, self esteem, and status. Community pressure may have caused you to sweat with seeding, overseeding, aerating, dethatch-ing, fertilizing, mowing, fighting hungry insects and aggressive weeds. The perfect lawn may have become such an obsession that you can maintain it only by polluting the environment with a chemical cocktail of insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers (Jenkins 1994; Robbins 2007). But there may be a better way. The purpose of this article is to briefly review the history of the American lawn, list some problems with lawn chemicals, describe alternatives to chemical management, and to suggest alternative landscape designs. We hope to convince landscape professionals that an organic or IPM lawn service may represent a new business opportunity.