Each year, as spring comes to the north coast, the dandelions in my yard rear their fuzzy little heads, bringing a profusion of bright blooms to my lawn.  Some lawns are green perfection, meticulously groomed and strictly for looking, the horticultural equivalent of the living room in which no one ever sits.  My lawn, as you might guess, is not one of them.

Depending on the season, my yard may feature volunteer wildflowers, such as the dandelions and violets, or the luxuriant foliage of what the unenlightened term “weeds.”  I don’t feed and I rarely water my lawn.  Anything that can’t thrive without my intervention is doomed.  My weeds, however, are not.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, professional terminators, armed with tanks of chemical weapons, regularly sweep lawns clean of undesirables.  They eliminate some plants, nourish the chosen few, and clip what remains to a flat mat of patio-carpet green.  To mark their conquest, the dandelion death squads plant little flags indicating, by their illustration, that this lawn is not healthy for children and other living things.

Offensive landscaping can be summed up as the planting and nurturing of what is wanted, while defensive landscaping, the underlying philosophy of most lawn care, is best understood as the seeking out and destroying of that which is not wanted.  My approach is one of passive landscaping, which simply cultivates a calm acceptance of whatever plants exhibit the most willingness to grow, and then leaving them alone.  Call me lazy, but I believe my philosophy is healthier in more ways than one.

I’m all for offensive landscaping in its place.  I like a good tomato now and then, and some petunias – purple and white, I think – would look good along the edge of my front walk.  But as far as the lawn goes, I don’t understand why we can’t step back and allow the turf grass we seem to think should be there to give way to the plants that clearly are much more suited to the job.

Who made the rule that our lawns must look like the felt on a miniature golf course, anyway?  What would be wrong, I want to know, with having a yard of whatever plants might move in and thrive if we stopped poisoning, feeding and watering our lawns and just mowed now and then?  As long you can play ball on it, in what way would the quality of our lives be affected?  I just don’t get it.

I did not plant my lawn.  It came with the house when I moved here 20 years ago, and there’s still a fair complement of what I suppose is grass.  But each spring, there’s a little more gold among the green.  Each spring, there are a few more bright yellow dandelions than the year before.  As far as I’m concerned, this is progress.