From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret

Roach.

You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow.

Reducing the footprint of our lawns has been a key environmental message for gardeners

in recent years.

Since lawns lack biodiversity and involve huge amounts of pollution

between fertilizers, herbicides, and the gas used in mowing. But what to cultivate instead?

That is the subject of an early 15-year research project called the Native Lawn at Cornell Botanic

Gardens in Ithaca, New York, with some interesting insights. More in a moment but first this message. Underwriting support for a way to garden by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs. Flower

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My guest today is Todd Bittner, a plant ecologist who with his Cornell Botanic Gardens colleagues

began a quarter acre research experiment known as the Native Lawn Demonstration Area.

Please do walk on these plants, a sign on a pedestal tell's visitors, explaining that it's

a test of a mix of low growing natives as an alternative to traditional lawn.

I'm so glad he's here to tell us more about what they've learned along the way.

Hi Todd, how are you? I'm great. Thank you for having me. Yes, we caused a ruckus with the

New York Times story we worked on together and we'll talk about that in a minute. But when you

tell people you want to take away their lawn or suggest it, boy oh boy, get some upset people.

So we'll talk about that. But I wanted to just kind of get a background, a little bit,

a short background, you know, kind of what's in your lawn and how did it begin, how did this kind

of begin? Because it's very different from some of the other possibilities I've heard before.

...