Grass lawns are terrible for the environment in many cases. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but between exhaustion of fresh water resources and air pollution from lawn management it is often a net negative in the end.
Natural surfaces are the way forward.
Yeah, I was reading this the other day:
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...ot-death-metal-irish-baron-rewilds-his-estate
My fiancee and I really would like to do a wild garden, no idea how you do it though!
Exactly right! This has been on my mind a lot as well the past few years. Having a grass lawn kinda 'goes against nature', as monocultural patches just aren't sustainable without intervention (fertiziler, watering) in the long-term. For example, grass uses nitrogen from the soil, so you'd need to grow it alongside nitrogen-fixing plants. I have been trying to do better with that; I have sown white clover (a nitrogen-fixing plant) in a corner of my terrain now, to see how that does.
I have also been trying to let 'weeds' grow more. (I am putting that in apostrophes, as there is nothing wrong with most 'weeds'; the word just refers to plants we don't want.) That's not great though, as some species get dominant easily and are not necessarily nice to see or to walk on - and I do want my kids to be able to play outside barefeet. That's also why a creeping thyme lawn doesn't work for me: thyme is not soft to walk on, and bees and others get attracted to its flowers. (It's otherwise a great solution to grass lawns though, and much prettier.) And that's also why I'm not letting my garden basically go nuts, as the grass and plants get too tall.
All the same, the clover+grass solution should hopefully work well until my kids are old enough and I can convert most of the grass to patches of plants - which is the really sustainable solution. I have already been looking into local plants and flowers (i.e., that can handle our usual summer and winter conditions) that we can plant. Asclepias (milkweed) is definitely going to be a part of that, as it's nice-looking, gets big, and the only source of food that monarch butterflies will use.
Anyway, to get away from the rambling a little: I think that's what they mean by a wild garden. Get a lot of local plants, and let them take over your garden. They'll reseed themselves, and you'll have a full and diverse and sustainable ground cover within years. Garden centres should be able to help making the right choices, but if you're brave, you could also try bringing in plants you see thriving and flowering along roads. Obviously, they are the kind that do great without receiving any gardening care. ('Brave', because some of those might also be invasive spieces that will take over; and some plans might be painful to touch or (somewhat) toxic.)
Oh, btw, another reason to get rid of huge grass lawns: Japanese beetles! (
link) It's a kind of scarab that's indigenous to Japan, and is not a pest there because it has natural predators and there isn't as much grass surface where it can hatch its eggs; but here in eastern North America, it's the inverse on both counts and those scarabs are a right pain; they destroy plans outright if you don't go hunt for them regularly. (Catch them and put them in soapy water; it's hard to kill them in any other way, and believe me, once you see two dozen sitting on a rose flower and destroy it entirely, you want to kill them!)
Yeah, as you can tell, this is all on my mind a lot.
It's overall less about climate change than general sustainability though.
