The trend has taken hold with homeowners across the economic spectrum, with a variety of options available to people with different budgets and visions. There are upsides to learning to live with a drier, browner landscape: residents who have made the switch say getting rid of their grass lawns has helped them save money on water bills, and also opened up new design possibilities, including making yards that serve as natural refuges for local birds, butterflies, and insects. Right: A succulent garden at a home in Brentwood, California. Left: A bee lands on the desert-willow tree in the front yard of a South Los Angeles home.
The rejection of grass is also an ideological shift, towards an acceptance that “nature is its own decision-maker” and that “we had better learn to live a little differently with finite resources of water”, Deverell said. Lush, rectangular lawns played an important role in the marketing of southern California real estate to potential homeowners in the midwest, serving as a symbol of a “prosperous, rational, highly-ordered landscape … a way to harness the faith that the Anglo-American period had conquered nature”, Deverell explained. William Francis Deverell, an environmental historian at the University of Southern California, says there’s a reason grass came to dominate what is naturally a much drier landscape. “People wanting to have the ‘American lawn’ – it feels very irresponsible to do in a place where it’s not the natural landscape,” said Danielle Koplinka-Loehr, who grew up on the east coast and removed her Los Angeles lawn in 2020 as part of a city program. Starting this June, more than a thousand southern California residents a month made plans to replace their lawns with more drought-friendly landscapes, according to data from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The choice to conserve may be contagious.
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