Word: lawns
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Perhaps with that thought in mind, residents of Manhattan's lethal "alphabet city" have transformed a rubble-strewn lot into a community garden, with poetry readings and potluck dinners and tiny plots for 107 local gardeners. Some grow food or medicinal herbs: one woman grows a lawn, just so she can come out on Sunday mornings with her deck chair to read the newspaper. "I've lived here 20 years, and we never used to talk to people on the street," says Sandra Kleinman, now in her fourth year of nursing Egyptian onions and Japanese mustard greens. "I've never...
...purity and control over what they eat. Pests must be killed and plants fed, but the ingredients in pesticides and fertilizers often invite images of chemical warfare. Gardeners have grown cautious about what they use to defend against bugs. Jerry Baker, author of The Impatient Gardener, advises spraying the lawn with a mixture of Listerine, ammonia, chewing-tobacco juice and dish washing liquid. Others have discovered beer for immobilizing slugs, and human hair to discourage squirrels...
First it disrupts the domestic routine, as eggshells and quartered-orange peels are painstakingly transported from city to country to compost heap. Everything must be saved for that site: last year's annuals, the top of the lawn, wayward bits of hedge, all the archaeology of the planting season. Then the catalogs begin to multiply; one nursery carries more than 1,000 varieties of geraniums; another's pages read like a gothic romance. Since all addictions have organizations, the invitations start arriving to join the clubs. There are hundreds of groups for roses alone, not to mention the American Bamboo...
Unfortunately, such tastes often exceed what time allows, thereby ensuring that nurseries and garden-supply stores will be well stocked with shortcuts. Since in most cases a silky lawn is out of the question, there is a burgeoning market for "meadows in a can," which promise a vast, sweet meadow right out of a picture book. This illusion too does not come cheap: a 4-oz. can of Rocky Mountain wildflower seed from Smith & Hawken goes...
...Alex Rosenberg cultivated a tangle of weeds at their house in Water Mill, Long Island. "I read about English gardens," Carole explains. "They are too fussy for me." Someone suggested ornamental grasses from the Washington-based landscape-architect firm of Oehme, van Sweden, as a solution. The Rosenbergs' sloping lawn is now intersected and ringed with free-form gardens of 3-ft. grasses, Scotch Broom covered with saffron blossoms, blue allium balls, mounds of soft green sedums and spikes of silver-green lavender. "I wanted something to work with the wind," says Carole, reeling off Latin names...