In the country of the detached house with garden, the perfectly cut, very green lawn, enthroned in front of all the pavilions is an institution. But for the American landscape designer Edwina Von Gal, it is above all a chimera which it is time to give up. She has been designing gardens for more than forty years, she made those, for example, of the architect Frank Gehry and the stylist Calvin Klein, spaces imagined to correspond to their region. That is to say with as many local plants as possible, accustomed to the local climate, and therefore very little grass.
>> BEFORE/AFTER. Visualize the extent of the drought in France from space
Lawns are fragile monocultures that require a lot of water, pesticides, fertilizers, “an infernal cycle of addiction“, she said to the New York Times. She has been explaining it for years with total indifference, but at the end of a drought as intense in the United States as here, her words are finally starting to interest us. From New York Times on actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s podcast, she is invited everywhere to explain why all the lawns (except those of Sylvester Stallone and Kim Kardashian) burn out. Interviews where she also gives solutions. Because there are, without fertilizers, without pesticides, without huge expenses, and without a garden hose.
Edwina von Gal pleads for the mixture, for carpets of clovers and dandelions, these grasses classified as bad, generally drowned under liters of roundup, still authorized in the United States, but whose roots will draw much deeper than the grass and tolerate the lack of water better. The key against drought is the mixture of species, and that goes for example in dry regions by planting sage, rosemary, cacti, varieties of poppy, trying to find what corresponds to the region and that the reign of the turf-king has eclipsed.
And his vision takes. On Instagram and Tiktok, images of clover lawns are multiplying, especially via before/after videos, the “after” being quite magical, full of butterflies, bumblebees, birds. “It’s beautiful, lively, it’s economical, and above all it doesn’t require waiting for an election or a law, everyone can get started right away, right outside their door..”