Suburban [micro]Geomorphology

Exciting, huh!

I live on a corner lot, so I have an extra amount of sidewalk “verge” to maintain, if I choose to do so. Generally, I am in the low-maintenance camp of lawn tenders, as I regard the resources -chemicals, mechanical, human exertion – poured into suburban lawns as wasteful and destructive, and nothing but a ceaseless striving for status and property values informed by defunct English gentry values. Hah! Pretty serious stuff, these crummy lawns. All that fertilizer washing into the streams to promote eutrophication, not to mention the exasperating roar and drone of lawn machines every morning.

I used to pay a lawn care service when I was working – the time to mow the lawn was better spent reading, relaxing, or being with my family, but now that I am blissfully retired, I save about $2000 a year, mow the lawn every three or four weeks with a dinky battery powered piece, and I never edge! The lawn never looked so good, which brings me to the topic of micro geomorphology and lawn verges.

That strip of lawn verge in the picture above is just downstream of my neighbor’s lot, and the street and sidewalk are steeply sloped there. The darkened area on the verge is my successful (after years or trial and error) effort to replant a section that was repeatedly eroded by heavy and rapid flows during thunder storms.

As you can see in the photos above, my neighbor’s lawn is closely trimmed, each week by a service, and the edges are razor sharp. That’s the preferred aesthetic here in the ‘burbs, and it can look pretty neat, but as a friend of mine said, when those services are done for the day, your lawn looks “scrubbed.” Every stray bit of organic matter is removed by the leaf blowers, and the edges provide nice clean channels for rapid, and erosive, flow during the occasional thunderstorms, which can be intense. Note how the soil has been removed from alongside, and even under the sidewalk upslope of the telephone pole. I have erected a little barrier to divert the flow away from my newly planted portion of the verge, and it does help a lot. I tried this when I used a service, but their machines just broke it up each week – they’re in a hurry to move on. That’s another advantage of dispensing with the service: I have become more intimately familiar with each little bit of my suburban landscape and can devise microstrategies to protect and nurture them. And lo, the seed is sprouting!

The image above shows my edges, soft and sloppy, which slow down the water, capture and retain soil, and give a gentler, less severe look to my little trivial Eden in el mundo suburbo. During the fall, I run the mower over the dry leaves to create a mulch that retains water and eventually creates new soil. (The lawn services blow them into piles and truck them away.) In such little worlds do I lose myself these days.