What will the neighbors think?

It didn’t take long for that question to become front of mind when Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband, Evan Cooper, bought their first home, in Blue Bell, Penn., in the spring of 2022.

One question that answered itself right away: From the first pass with the mower over their 5,000 square feet of turfgrass, the couple knew that mowing a big lawn every week was not for them. But neither was the possibility of being seen as inconsiderate neighbors in their new community.

How could they reinvent their front yard without making an unwelcome impression?

This would be their first attempt at making a garden, but Sara Cooper was no stranger to the subject of lawn alternatives.

She has vivid memories from childhood of a backyard with “all these fun nooks in which to play, get lost in and explore.” That yard was the work of her father, Larry Weaner, a landscape designer in Glenside, Pennsylvania, for more than 40 years and a leader in the ecological landscape design movement in the United States.

Since 2019, Sara Cooper, 34, has been the executive director of New Directions in the American Landscape, an organization Weaner founded in 1990 to promote ecology-based landscape design and practice. There, she develops and coordinates educational programs, many for a professional audience.

But in response to increasing inquiries from lay people, she had an idea that will come to fruition in December, when the organization kicks off a multisession online course for home gardeners called Landscaping With Nature. Taught by Weaner, it is “a condensed, simplified version of our professional intensive course,” she said, complete with its own manual. (A short segment on her DIY front-yard project will be included; she is also doing a webinar about the yard adventure on Nov. 21.)

Cooper knew that most people don’t have a mentor they can text or call with questions the way she and her husband do. And right from the start there were questions — so many questions.

Like that one about the neighbors.

Avoiding a “whole brown lawn”

After some discussion with Weaner about possible designs, Cooper and her husband began visualizing a meadow in front of their house.

But they knew that preparing the site by getting rid of the grass — either using herbicides or solarization under plastic to kill it, or a sod stripper to remove it completely — would create “a whole brown lawn for a while,” Cooper said. Not a delightful sight for the neighbors.

Was there another tactical approach that was organic and also minimized the ugly phase, she and Evan Cooper asked Weaner?

He offered a suggestion, although it wasn’t his usual practice. “He said we could try seeding and planting into the existing turf, and just try to weaken the existing turf and strengthen the native plants,” Sara Cooper said.

This would be a bit of an experiment, they understood, and wasn’t the quickest means to an end.

“The things that we are doing are definitely a longer process than the maybe more conventional way of killing or removing the turfgrass first, and then just seeding or planting into bare soil,” she said.

As she and Evan Cooper were getting started in the fall of 2022, she took what proved to be another important preliminary step. She put out a lawn sign reading “Native Meadow in Progress” to communicate to neighbors that what they were about to see happening was intentional, not the beginning of a pattern of neglect. The sign invited questions and included her contact information.

Then the couple began their efforts to weaken the lawn and make it more receptive to what was coming — to the planned overseeding with meadow species and to young transplants of other types.

First, they applied sulfur to lower the pH of the underlying soil and bind nutrients to it, making the elements less available to vegetation. “The turfgrass needs fertility, and the meadow doesn’t,” Sara Cooper explained. “So that benefits the native meadow plants.”

They mowed the lawn short, and then had at it with a dethatcher, or power rake, rented from a local big-box store. “Basically, we disturbed the top layer of soil and disrupted the shallow root system of the turfgrass in order to thin out the grass,” she said. “That allows more light to reach the soil surface where the seeds will be, where we seeded eventually.”

Looking for signs of success

Seeding wouldn’t happen until the next January, following another round of dethatching. That first fall, they planted strategically placed drifts of live plants — some mixed groupings and others a mass of a single species, like blue wild indigo (Baptisia australis) and clustered mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum). The drifts of transplants would help shorten the waiting time before there was some visual payoff, flowering sooner than seed-grown choices.

After sowing, they waited and watched expectantly. And then: seedlings!

“It was so fun to see the first few things coming up,” Sara Cooper said. “It wasn’t a given.”

An evolving mowing regimen

Once-a-year mowing, around the end of March, is now part of the care regimen for their increasingly established meadow. But along the way, the mower was called into service repeatedly in targeted maneuvers at key moments, cutting the growth to varying heights to further weaken the lawn in the evolving mix.

The couple cut the grass as short as possible with their electric mower around the drifts where the transplants were gradually getting established. Elsewhere, once the seeded plants started coming up through the turf, they needed to keep knocking back the grass without beheading the desired seedlings.

“The first year and this past second year, we needed to do that strategically timed mowing,” Cooper said. “I was able to adjust the mower higher and higher to just keep cutting that turfgrass, but not cut the seedlings. Once the seedlings got taller than the turfgrass, then obviously I stopped mowing.”