I LOVE GARDENING. I LOVE GETTING MY hands dirty, and seeing a blank slate of dirt turned into a lush garden of beauty of perfumed air. I’m very lucky in that I have a home with both a front yard and a back yard.
My front yard is sort of a work in progress of low consumption water wise plants. I’ve got some funky grasses that turn blue when they are well watered and other slow growing dark green stuff I can walk on that’s not really grass, I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it flowers.
My back yard on the other hand is a 3,000 square foot park. I’ve got fruit trees and flowering trees and a croquet course sized lawn (anyone know where I can get some flamingos and a couple of hedgehogs?).
Last summer was the summer of the rototiller. I was stripping my yard down to nothing so that I could build a party space. Trees were installed, a sprinkler system, roses, shrubs, tulips and daffodils and hundreds of cubic yards of manure.
Last year I was looking into water wise ways to reduce my usage, while at the same time, enjoying a lush green forest of nature. Some of the things I looked at were preserved trees and synthetic lawns.
I was amazed at the level of growth in fake plants (That’s funny huh? Get it?). We’ve come a long way from the hard, yellowing plastic of your grandma. These days you can get “silk” flowers that look so real it is darn near impossible to tell they are fake, but they have the benefits of not needing to be watered, fertilized and tended. There are also trees that have been cut and freeze dried.
But best of all are the technologies having to do with fake lawns. These “grasses” are amazing. They are fake grass that comes from a synthetic material, like petroleum products, they are soft, and come in designer colors and grades for everything from a long and lush St. Augustine style grass to a putting green height and smoothness.
Since these products no longer use water, and don’t actually grow, they don’t have the downside of maintenance, mowing, fertilizing, weeding, that actual real lawns do. There is some ecological cost in that they are manufactured from petroleum products so they use up precious oil that should be used for jet skiing, but nothing’s perfect.
Of course they also don’t contribute to the balancing of the ecology either, by not replacing CO2 with life giving oxygen, and they store the heat from the sun, and that just contributes to global warming with no counterbalancing effect.
Financially, they are a good investment, because you don’t have to hire gardeners to maintain the lawns and trees and flowers. There is a tremendous savings in the reduction of plumbing needs, and of course there is the amount of water and fertilizers that are saved. The green house gas savings continue when you consider the benefits of not having to run lawnmowers, hedgers, trimmers and blowers.
Which is why I want to suggest that our City Council study the costs and benefits of removing all the public green spaces that have live growing grass and trees, and replacing them with synthetic lawns, and freeze-dried trees.
The upgrades would allow City Hall to shutter the open spaces management department. There will be a one time charge when we layoff all those employees, and of course pay off the lawyers when the inevitable discrimination lawsuit is filed, but the savings we will enjoy by not having to pay salaries, health insurance, and pension funds are well worth it.
Similar savings will be seen across the board in the plumbing department, and in vehicle maintenance, but they wont be as great. The administrative benefits of such a plan have not been determined, but I would venture a guess they would be in the tens of millions of dollars and man-hours that are saved in not having to manage employees.
As a green city it is our responsibility to be in the forefront of the efforts to reduce the cost of our existence on this planet, and by installing synthetic lawns, freeze-dried trees and “silk” flowers, we can have a huge impact on the amount of natural resources we use as a city, and we can enjoy the benefits of budgetary reductions, which could, possibly, translate into a tax reduction for the homeowners who foot the bills.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 8, 2008. Read the original PDF.