By Upendra Mishra
BOSTON-Even before I hade heard the term “delawning”, a couple friend of mine from my alma mater JNU had bought a home in New Jersey and had decided to replace a part of their beautiful lawn with wildflowers. I was not surprised because both have been environmental enthusiasts and have great passion for bird watching since our JNU days.
The news about global warming and climate change had also started to get intense. I decided to follow my friends’ path. Although I was scared to do anything that will destroy the beauty of the lawn, I thought I would do some experiments in that direction. Nothing substantial. Just a few things here and there.
Delawning is simply replacing a curated lawn with something different: doing nothing, letting it go wild, planting wild flowers, or putting something to replace the lawn that consumes a lot of water and fertilizers that pollutes the water sources.
Delawning has now become a movement in the United States among environmentalists and climate activists, and of course among some homeowners who are replacing resource-intensive lawns with items of their choice.
This is what I did:
- I reduced the size of the vegetable garden. It was too big anyway.
- The space that was freed by the vegetable patch I converted into a wildflower bed and added native plants.
- There was an area that was close to a water stream but had dried up over the years. I dig it slightly for natural water flow and left the surroundings untouched. I also planted some native plants suitable for soggy areas.
- I also left wildflowers and native plant growing on the edges of the laws to expand by a feet or so.
- We also planted some apple and pear trees.
In two years, the entire ecosystem in the garden changed. We have an incredible number and varieties of insects, bugs, butterflies, frogs, birds and wildlife.
One weekend this summer, me and my wife were doing some work in the kitchen and our son came running and asked us to look outside. We saw that on one side of the house its was sunny and on other side of the house (the partially delawned area) it was gently raining. We were amazed.
The video below gives you a look at the delawned Mishra Garden of the summer of 2024. To watch the video, please click here, or on the image below.
(Mr. Mishra is managing partner of the Waltham, MA-based diversified media company The Mishra Group. He writes about his three passions: marketing, scriptures, and gardening.)
