Weeds Are Wonderful

As if crab grass, dandelions and seed-snatching birds were not enough, America's lawn keepers face a new peril this spring: a small but growing band of "natural" landscapers who scorn the national fetish for meticulously manicured lawns and are letting their yards grow as wild and weedy as nature permits. One such heretic, Donald Hagar of New Berlin, Wis., a Milwaukee suburb, let plant life take its course when he moved into a house on 2 1/2 acres in the town's Sun Shadows West subdivision. Hagar put in some wild Wisconsin prairie grass and let nature do the rest. The result: knee-high waves of goldenrod, aster, orchard grass and fleabane. Instead of a sputtering power mower, meadow larks, foxes and pheasants roam the Hagar yard.

The Hagars were only following a tradition that goes back even beyond Goethe, who argued: "No one feels himself easy in a garden which does not look like the open country." Sun Shadow West residents had the Hagars hauled into court for violating a town law forbidding the presence of "noxious weeds," only to have a judge rule that the Hagars could let it all grow out. Local antiweed ordinances have also been struck down in other communities, giving lawn traditionalists a thorny problem.

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