Lawns can provide valuable open space for kids and pets to play, create a tidy appearance and offer a sense of order and care. For many homeowners they are a source of pride.
However, maintaining large expanses of lawn — particularly in rarely used areas –comes with significant costs. Traditional turf requires frequent mowing, regular watering, and often fertilizers and pesticides to stay green. Despite this intensive care, lawns provide minimal ecological value: they support few pollinators, offer little wildlife habitat, and do little to filter stormwater, stop erosion, or improve soil health. In urban and suburban landscapes where unused lawn covers large portions of properties, these environmental impacts add up.
The Advantages of Reducing Lawn
Replacing lawn with dense, diverse native plantings offers multiple benefits. When native plants are carefully matched to your site and arranged in groups that mimic natural communities, they create landscapes that need less routine maintenance. These plantings shade out weeds, retain moisture, and support one another—eliminating mowing, reducing watering, and requiring no fertilizers or pesticides. Deep root systems improve soil health, increase water infiltration, and reduce stormwater runoff. Native plantings also provide essential habitat for pollinators, birds, and beneficial insects while reflecting the natural character of our region with vastly more dynamic seasonal interest than mowed grass.
Reducing Lawn At Brightside
The Brightside Demonstration Garden has a small lawn in the middle of the garden for picnicking and sunbathing and for children to run and play. It provides a nice visual contrast to the surrounding dense, diverse native plantings that offset its maintenance costs and ecological impact. At the garden, you can see that you don’t have to eliminate your lawn entirely. Keep the areas you actively use for play, pets, or gatherings, and focus on replacing underutilized spaces — side yards, steep slopes, areas beneath large shade trees, or difficult-to-mow spots — with native plantings suited to those conditions. This gives you functional lawn where you need it and vibrant, lower-maintenance gardens where you don’t.
How to Convert Lawn to Planting Beds
Establish your edges
Start by defining the border of your new bed. Use stones, metal edging, or dig a 4-inch trench with a flat spade along the outline. A rope, hose, or landscape paint works well as a guide for curved edges. Where the bed meets a sidewalk or paved surface, dig a 6-inch trench to create a lip that will contain mulch and prevent it from spilling onto pavement.
Remove The Turf
There are a few different techniques to convert areas of lawn and weeds into native planting beds. At Brightside we recommend using one of these two:
Smothering (Recommended)
There are many techniques used to smother existing turf or weeds, and they all work by blocking water and light from reaching the unwanted plants. You can use plastic, tarps, cardboard, newspaper, or even thick layers of mulch. At Brightside, we suggest the following method:
Cut the grass as short as possible and leave clippings in place. Cover with overlapping brown cardboard, ensuring no gaps. Top with 3–4 inches of chunky or shredded wood mulch. Wait 8-12 weeks for the cardboard to break down (spring applications work best), then cut holes through the softened cardboard to plant. The cardboard decomposes completely within a year. This method eliminates existing turf while blocking weed seed germination for easier long-term maintenance.
Digging
Digging out turf or using a sod cutter is quicker than smothering and can be effective where the lawn is patchy and weak. The benefit of this method is that you can plant and mulch as soon as you’re done. However, there are drawbacks: thick turf makes the work slow and physically demanding, much of the topsoil and organic matter is removed in the process, and existing weed seeds are exposed to light, causing them to germinate and leading to more maintenance down the road.
Important: Always avoid tilling, as it destroys soil structure, increases erosion, and brings up even more weed seeds.
See it at the Demo Garden