After three years pleading his case to his landlord, Daniel Lassman finally received permission to begin restoring native plants in his yard. On Wednesday, he discovered someone had cut his efforts to the roots.
As a professional restoration ecologist who works on conservation issues with the USDA, Lassman was excited to begin restoring native species in his yard in Old West Lawrence.
He began by reducing his regular mowing to just around the sidewalks and letting the rest of the yard grow higher. Letting the plants grow higher rather than mowing them allows the roots to grow deeper, which helps loosen compacted soil, improve runoff, and fix erosion.
He also encouraged the growth of weedy species — anything that is not an ecologically invasive species or a baby tree or woody plant — which will fill in gaps without taking over like invasive species. In addition to helping decompact soil, weedy species help stabilize the area for future species.
Lassman took care to leave the area under native trees unmowed because “we’re basically in an insect extinction crisis right now,” and mowing under native trees causes further habitat loss and harm to beneficial insects that depend on those specific trees, he said.
But Wednesday evening, Lassman discovered that his yard had been “brutally cut down,” he wrote in a Facebook post. He was concerned that someone may have “tried to destroy something they don’t understand instead of stopping to ask and see what’s happening.”
‘This was the best outcome’
“I’m sorry,” a man said as he crossed the street toward Lassman during an interview for this article Thursday evening. “I’m the one who mowed this lawn accidentally. I’m sorry.”
David Douglass was on his way to mow a new client’s lawn but got the address confused — “I saw how long it was and I said, ‘Well, this must be it.’”
Douglass offered to go over the mowed area again with his mower set to the highest setting and bag up the clippings so they wouldn’t smother and kill any vegetation left behind.
“I’m really relieved to know that it wasn’t malicious,” said Lassman, who plans to install some signage in the future to prevent future mishaps. “This was the best outcome.”
But the lawn likely won’t be able to recover this late in the season, and Lassman is worried about the damage.
Allowing grass to grow also supports beneficial insects. Mowing grass down can have the opposite effect. Just a day after the mowing incident, Lassman and his neighbors said they have already noticed an increase in mosquitoes. Chiggers and ticks are also supported by mowed lawns.
Eudora’s mowing menace
Much to Lassman’s relief, his yard was not the victim of a trend that others in his field have witnessed recently.
Courtney Masterson, ecologist and executive director of Native Lands Restoration Collaborative, said restoration projects are occasionally mysteriously mowed.
“Every once in a while something gets mowed and nobody knows who mowed it,” she said. “Lately it’s been happening a lot. And on some projects, it’s weekly.”
Every Native Lands project involves community engagement and education, and the restoration sites all have informative signage. Although it’s possible that some people mow a restoration site unwittingly, some people have taken down the signs and moved large rocks to raze the land with their lawn mowers. Some sites have even had truckloads of mulch dumped on them and trees cut down by unknown people.
“These folks know what they’re doing,” Masterson said. “It is people deliberately destroying these restoration projects. They just don’t agree with native landscapes.”
A restoration project on public land in Eudora is the target of a motivated mower. Someone has been mowing the site weekly, destroying the restoration progress and prohibiting the plants from establishing.
The area the mower has targeted was the seed production area of the project, and the plants there will not survive the weekly mowings. Since it’s public land, it’s up to the Eudora parks department to initiate filing a police report, Masterson said.
“It’s one individual choosing to destroy something the community has invested in,” Masterson said. “It’s happening enough now that it’s a growing concern and creating serious loss.”
Masterson said restoration projects, especially those on public land, are usually aimed to improve issues that threaten water and soil quality and to reduce pesticide and herbicide use. She said the projects are bipartisan, nonpolitical issues.
“Everyone wants clean water, healthy soil, resources for pollinators. It benefits all of us,” she said. “What we’re doing is preserving the earth’s capacity to host our species. If we don’t have native landscapes we will cease to exist.”
Encouraging ecology
Lassman offered some advice for anyone interested in counteracting the changes to our climate through their own lawn care.
Beginning to manage your lawn in a way that encourages the ecology — native and non-native — to recover is the first step, he said. Planting natives from seeds or plugs is good, too.
“Whenever you’re establishing natives, it’s going to look really bad for about a year,” Lassman told his neighbors who stopped by for a chat. “It’s going to look like you failed.”
The most important thing, though, is creating ecological corridors — continuous areas of native species that crisscross through urban and rural areas. This would mean neighbors and cities work together to create “continuous areas of natives that would all connect up like little rivulets up the street … like a network.”
Also important, Lassman said, is advocacy for funding and resources at the local, state and federal levels.
He also would like to see an update to the city code that provides a subsidy to encourage people to plant native species and the implementation of increased educational programs to help people learn about native plants.
Get involved
Lassman teaches restoration ecology sessions at the Lawrence Public Library, generally at 11 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month, followed by a field trip to a local native landscape. This month’s class will meet at 9 a.m. on Sunday, July 14, however, because of the heat and a schedule change.
Native Lands aims to “empower diverse land stewards to protect and restore resilient native ecosystems” through community education. Learn more on their website at nativelandsks.org.
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Molly Adams (she/her), photojournalist and news operations coordinator for The Lawrence Times, can be reached at molly@lawrencekstimes.com. Check out more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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