But if you let the fallen leaves sit on your lawn all winter they are a matted wet mess in the spring and they kill your lawn. I blow mine to wooded areas at the edges of my property
That’s just revealing how strange and unnatural lawns are. I switched to low-growing native plants and have been very happy with almost zero maintenance.
We domisticated grazing animals since a while in large numbers, the smaller ones do produce something like a lawn. And soft grass is just really nice to play around with the kids. So I also simply keep bushes and tree spots for the leaves and insects.
It’s not really a complicated philosophical question.
Lawns aren’t native to your area. That type of grass didn’t evolve there, and it didn’t evolve to being trimmed short. That’s why it doesn’t produce seeds and why it’s killed by leaves.
But where I live there are larges areas of native grass that evolved to being trimmed short by grazers, spreading eagerly through rhizomes as a survival trait because of frequent brush fires. It gets killed by leaves every spring and spreads back by the fall but after a burn the trees are gone and its one of the early succession pioneers. A maintained lawn is just holding a post-burn condition in stasis.
Simplistic answers really work best when things are complicated philosophical questions.
My lawn, like what I consider a 'typical' lawn, is grass. Grasses spread through rhizomes. Rhizomes are one of the things that define grasses. The rhizomes are what let the grass survive going dormant in the hot and dry summer, the frozen ground and deep snow cover in the winter, and the frequent fires every few decades for which the entire local ecosystem is heavily adapted. And yes, grasses will reproduce sexually as well if left uncut/ungrazed/unburnt.
You point was that lawns are not normal. My point is that lawns are completely normal, at least where I live.
Native and natural in the sense of 'adapted to its environment', not 'static'
Transplanting 'English Manor' grass and lawn practices to a desert creates an unbridgeable adaptation gap. This kind of lawn cannot survive without draining every aquifer in a 300 mile radius. Texas lawns, in particular, yearn for death, you can watch them die in real time.
Lawns that require almost no maintenance using native plants have always been possible, but they don't reflect the class and status dynamics that neighborhoods want to show off.
They'd rather have dying sickly grass most of the year, and pay yearly to to replace, than allow a single 'weed' to be a part of their landscaping.
"Lawns that require almost no maintenance using native plants have always been possible, but they don't reflect the class and status dynamics that neighborhoods want to show off."
In wild nature, there tend to be spikey things. I still run barefoot there. I don't care about status dynamics, but I do also like a soft grassy ground to jump and run around with my kids,
But I do let patches on the side grow complete, only mowing once a year - and especially before the fireflies come - I let the whole lawn grow extra high (with only some ways cut low) for the fireflies and insects. In spring the flowers are also nice. Still, some patches of nice lawn I always have and use with joy. It all is a compromise (still it greatly triggers me, if family members mow too early and too much).
You’re just inventing your own definitions of “native” and “natural” that are different from how scientists and other people use those words. It’s a pointless semantic argument.
