habitat at home

Wildflower plantings and local rules – finding common ground

Mixed planting of yellow and red blackeyed Susans, purple asters, yellow sneezeweed, white yarrow, and red coreopsis near a sidewalk and street.
These blackeyed susan, aster, yarrow, sneezeweed, and coreopsis can add beauty and ecological services to your yard. How can they be compatible with your local home owner’s association or municipality ordinances?

There are many good reasons to grow something other than mowed grass in your home landscape. You might want to feed insects and birds, grow more native plant species, or just spend less time and fuel mowing grass. Sometimes more “natural” – by which I mean containing less mowed grass and more diverse native plant species – landscaping can seem to be at odds with ordinances established by a local municipality or homeowner’s association (HOA). But it doesn’t have to be.

Every year at Cornell IPM we get a few questions from folks who have been asked to remove a native meadow or wildflower planting by a local governing body. This post is dedicated to sharing some resources that might come in handy, should you ever find yourself in this position.

Benefits of a more natural landscape

Growing a diverse collection of plants native to your area can have many benefits, including:

  • Provide food and shelter for friendly insects – pollinators and natural enemies that help with pest control
  • Offer food and shelter for birds
  • Promote better water infiltration and reduced run-off
  • Reduce maintenance and inputs (e.g., pesticides, fertilizers, time and fuel used for mowing) because plants are well-adapted to your area
  • It’s beautiful!

Understand and acknowledge common values behind local rules

If you’re familiar with active and effective listening strategies for having conversations across differences, you probably know the importance of understanding and acknowledging the values and concerns of the person with whom you are talking. The same applies when your desire to landscape more naturally conflicts with local rules. Many of the goals or values behind the rules are ones you probably share. For example:

  • Making your neighborhood (including sidewalks) walkable
  • Safety, including visibility of pedestrians and cyclists near intersections
  • Accessibility for delivery people, meter readers, etc. doing their jobs
  • Minimizing pest problems, including rodents and invasive or noxious weeds
  • Aesthetics (although this can be a very subjective value!)

Focus on shared goals and identify ways natural landscaping can achieve them. For example, as you design and implement your natural landscaping plan, choose shorter and less “floppy” plants to border sidewalks. Make sure that your plants don’t block a motorist’s view around a corner. As much as 8-10 feet of clear space may be needed.

Bumble bee perched on the yellow center of a flower with yellow petals. A sidewalk and road are visible in the background.
The bumble bees loved this sneezeweed. But it was a little too tall and floppy for me to be growing right next to the sidewalk. Lesson learned!

Where you disagree with your HOA or local municipality, respectful conversation and relationship-building is likely to be a more effective strategy to bring about change than blatantly flaunting rules. Homegrown National Park has some good advice about how to work with your HOA when growing native plants and how to talk to your neighbors about landscaping with native plants.

Sidenote: It is true that not all the values behind local rules are admirable. HOAs (and plenty of municipal laws) have also been used to implicitly or explicitly exclude people from neighborhoods based on race or ethnicity.

 

Make a plan and communicate it clearly

Your natural landscaping may feel weedy to other people because it can take perennial plants a few years to fully establish, or simply because it looks different that mowed grass and traditional annual bedding plants. Be ready to share your answers to the following questions with skeptical neighbors or those whose job it is to enforce local rules.

  • Which plant species (common and Latin names) are you growing?
  • Why are you growing them? What ecological – or other – benefits do they bring to your property and the neighborhood?
  • What are you doing to manage and maintain your natural landscaping and prevent or deal with weed problems?

While natural landscaping may be lower (and different) maintenance than a lawn, it is not zero maintenance. Demonstrating that you have a clear plan for how to maintain your natural landscaping can assuage fears.

It’s also a good idea to know details of the local rules that apply to your property. Is there a list of plant species that are prohibited? Or especially desirable plants? Some of the plants you are using in your natural landscaping may be on the desirable plant list or may help to exclude undesirable weeds.

Prairie Up is an organization that designs, educates about, and advocates for more natural landscaping. They have some great information about working with city code and HOA bylaws.

Clusters of orange milkweed flowers with a firefly feeding at one of the flowers.
This butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) is shorter and has a more compact growth habit than common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). It still supports beneficial insects (like this firefly) and is a better choice than common milkweed in some parts of your yard.

 

Rodents & Ticks

When I talk about wildflower plantings, I am almost always asked about rodents, ticks, or both. It is true that taller vegetation provides better habitat for mice and rats than mowed grass. It’s easier for rodents and their burrow openings to hide in dense vegetation. And the seeds produced in wildflower meadows will be an extra food source, even if you are meticulous about eliminating human food sources (for example, unprotected garbage or compost receptacles). In a residential yard, a wildflower planting is unlikely to be the sole cause of a rodent problem. But it can contribute to a rodent problem by providing shelter and some food.

The concern about ticks is also not un-founded. Taller, denser vegetation is very attractive to some tick species (and the animals they feed on). To the extent that natural landscaping contributes to ecosystem diversity, it may help to increase balance in your home ecosystem. For example, evidence suggests that a loss of biodiversity increases the risks of vector-borne diseases.  Certainly, there have been studies that link the abundance of at least some invasive plant species to tick populations. If you like delving into the scientific literature, this review addresses vector-borne diseases in general, and this study focused on Lyme disease, specifically.

Mixture of tall wildflowers and grasses with an open field and trees visible in the background.
Is this mixture of tall grasses and wildflowers harboring ticks and rodents? Maybe. Use the steps below to reduce your risk.

This is one of those situations where we want a simple answer, but it’s complicated. Here’s my recommendation:

 

The bottom line is that you can include natural landscaping in your yard, even if you live in an HOA or your municipality has rules about vegetation in your yard. Here are a few more resources that might be useful to you as you navigate real and perceived conflicts between local rules and natural landscaping:

 

 

This post was written by Amara Dunn-Silver, Biocontrol Specialist with the Cornell IPM Program, utilizing resources shared by Homegrown National Park and Prairie Up. Thanks to colleagues Matt Frye and Joellen Lampman for sharing their expertise on rodents and ticks!

 

This work is supported by the NYS Departments of Environmental Conservation and Agriculture and Markets.