Fight for the Natives
I pulled my car up to the curb and opened the windows, letting the cool spring breeze waft past me. I had arrived about half an hour early for a scheduled interview, and as I settled down to wait, I caught sight of a flock of nine wild turkeys. I found their appearance almost surreal as they strode through the backyards of the upscale development I waited in, which was nestled in a valley beneath untouched hills dotted with towering live oaks. As I watched, the turkeys hurried along, disappearing behind a line of fences. An auspicious sighting, I decided. I had come to Lincoln, California, to talk with Jeff Seigrist about the dream house he and his wife, Carolyn, had built on 2.6 acres of land in Loomis, overlooking Folsom Lake. I first became aware of Jeff when, nearly a year ago, he spoke at a California Native Plant Society meeting attended by my father. The Seigrists had built their home, an original design, using sustainable, often recyclable materials. They had filled their property with native plants and wild-flowers, creating a functioning habitat requiring almost no care and watering. Two separate organizations had labeled their yard a wildlife sanctuary. Instead of being rewarded for all this, the Seigrists were punished for it.
Jeff is a staunch believer in the importance of landscaping with native plants. The concept for the lawns that most of us maintain and grow today actually stretch back centuries, as a way for the French and English elite to flaunt their wealth. In those days, the fact that a person could afford not only to allow a large swathe of land to lie fallow, but also that they had enough servants to hand-clip the grass, was the ultimate display of wealth. The advent of powered lawn mowers gave the middle class a chance to copy the rich in this respect. There is little other reason for lawns to exist. Before WWII the average lawn was about 50% grass and 50% non-grass plants. However, modern fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, mowers, and grass varieties have created a vast monoculture across the country, comprised of hundreds of thousands of identical, almost 100% grass yards. "They [lawns] require so much care (such as watering, frequent fertilizing, weed management, and irrigation), the lawn industry in the United States is larger than the rest of the horticultural industry put together," Jeff said. "We're destroying our biodiversity for this monoculture-type gardening mentality ... you go to any hardware store or nursery nation-wide, and it's the same three dozen plants, that everyone wants." Jeff and Carolyn had landscaped the backyard of their previous home in St. Louis with native plants. The house had been featured in an issue of Better Homes and Gardens and had also caught the attention of the Missouri Botanical Garden, which wanted to add it to their garden tour. Taking pity on his neighbors, whom he did not think would appreciate having tour buses depositing people on their street, Jeff politely declined. In Sacramento, an area a few scant inches of rainfall away from being classified as a desert, and with the house being built overlooking a major watershed, Jeff and Carolyn turned once again to the native gardening techniques they had used with such success in St. Louis. They hand-planted 7,500 plugs of native needle grasses and sowed pounds of wildflower seed. To their delight, their efforts reaped a veritable Eden — a broad field of brilliant orange poppies (the California state flower), mixed with delicate blue spears of Douglas lupine. Soon, their yard teemed with animal life. Birds filled the trees, butterflies drifted from flower to flower, and a family of deer "camped out" on their land. Native species the Seigrists had not planted, such as fairy lanterns and native irises, popped up. Sunset Magazine used a photo of their home in a landscaping seminar brochure. However, even as he and Carolyn relished their success, a veil of disquiet began to descend. Despite the fact that both the County's general plan and the development laid out a policy to promote and protect native plants and the community's rural features, none of the houses being built by their neighbors seemed to follow these guidelines. Believing that their neighbors had every right to build as they wished, just as they had, Jeff and Carolyn said nothing. As they were soon to find out, that simple courtesy would not be extended to them in return.
Instead, to their horror, they soon found themselves under attack. In what had turned out to be a neighborhood of homogenous homes and lawns, their house stuck out as "different" and, in the eyes of the 3-person Home Owner's Board, anything different was to be ruthlessly pulled out and thrown aside. Though there was not a single CC&R (Conditions, Covenants & Restrictions) that the Seigrists were in violation of, they found themselves inundated with fines. Hateful letters, sent from lawyers and filled with threats, would often arrive right before major holidays. Every attempt the Seigrists made to placate the board was met with arrogance and outright hostility. Jeff remains mindful of the irony that the same people who persecuted him often went on drives and hikes to view fields of the very same wildflowers growing in his yard. Though many of Jeff and Carolyn's neighbors were on their side, they did not step forward for fear of facing the Board's wrath themselves. In California, the Seigrists discovered, HOAs had been granted sweeping power by the Davis-Sterling Act. In the past, HOAs had been forced to sue homeowners and pay court costs out of their own till. The Davis-Sterling Act allows HOAs to fine and foreclose outside of the court system, while their legal fees are covered by their insurance companies. For the Seigrists, the end result was that, while the HOA could force them through the justice system at no cost to the HOA, a court battle for the Seigrists had the potential to cost as much as $500,000 and occupy several years of their lives. After almost 2 years of fruitless fighting, and with their marriage dangerously strained, Jeff and Carolyn made the heart-breaking decision to sell their dream home. The power the state government handed the HOAs fits well with our country's "lawn" mentality, which is incredibly pervasive. When the contractors working on his new house in Lincoln accidentally turned off the sprinkler system, killing the grass, Jeff told them not to bother re-sodding the yard. He was planning to mulch it, he told them, and plant native species. The contractors told Jeff that the city of Lincoln would not issue an occupancy permit unless the house was sold with a traditional lawn in place. Though Jeff is now free to remove the sod himself, in reality the process is complicated by the costly irrigation system, which he never wanted in the first place, that runs just beneath the lawn's surface. With 25,000 homes planned just for Lincoln, the potential profits for lawn and landscaping companies is obvious. Almost all HOA CC&Rs require a homeowner to have a lawn, and sod-centric companies rake in money made from selling such items as top-soil, sod, sprinkler systems, fertilizer, and mowing services. Pollution, of both the air (from lawn-mower emissions) and the waterways (from required chemicals) also becomes a concern. With so many chemicals being dumped on lawns year 'round to keep them green, it is inevitable that the chemicals will wash into streams and lakes, where the nitrates kill fish and water plants. Jeff's old property required almost no water and zero chemicals to maintain its beauty. He was so successful that the California Urban Water Conservation Council contacted him and used his story as a case study for a proposed water conservation bill. A telling rebuke to our current, wasteful practices lies in the fact that Jeff and Carolyn's next door neighbors, also a 2-person household in a 3500 square foot home, on a same-sized lot, which was traditionally landscaped, used 21 times the amount of water as Jeff and Carolyn. Even after his experiences, Jeff is still a passionate promoter of landscaping with native plants, a practice often called xeriscaping. Xeriscaping enjoys government endorsement in Arizona and Colorado, where water use is strictly regulated, and Jeff feels that most areas in the country could benefit from people encouraging the growth of native plants. "There's many different kinds of grasses ... that require very little water and no chemicals. All the animals are going to love that you're planting their plants in your yard," Jeff said. In the Loomis house, he often noticed how silent his neighbors' properties were compared to his own. There were no birds, no butterflies, none of the wildlife he enjoyed living side by side with on his property. In Arizona, chollas, saguaros, barrels, ocotillo, yucca, palo verde and mesquite were once considered "trash" plants, to be ripped out and replaced with East Coast-style lawns. After this practice was outlawed, native plants became so desirable that people began stealing them. Jeff feels we need to encourage this kind of passion for native plants everywhere (though of course he does not approve of stealing to acquire a native plant). Jeff advises people to value the wonderful diversity and native plants that every location has. Instead of fighting native plants and grasses, use and promote them. Research local plants and throw in a few when landscaping. Many local plants require very little care and maintenance, and many, though sneered at as "weeds", are in actuality stunningly beautiful. Best of all, you will be helping to preserve native plants and wildlife, and you will be encouraging biodiversity, the importance of which cannot be stressed enough.
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