Ira Satinover has a dream … that the purple prairie grass, butterfly weed, the rattlesnake master rustling and swaying in his front yard has spread to every garden on his Oak Park block.
“I want you to imagine that you have an entire block of native plantings. Can you imagine the increase in biodiversity that would occur? It would attract birds, butterflies, pollinators — like bees,” said Satinover, a retired oral surgeon who has lived in his red-brick American foursquare home since 1985.
For now, Satinover’s dream remains only that. People pass by and stop to stare at the riot of color and textures, but they haven’t taken the plunge themselves.
“It’s a different approach to a manicured lawn,” said neighbor Varanya Chaiprasert, tactfully. “I just like things kind of neat.”
Laura Young would do what her neighbor has done, except that she lives in an apartment on the block. “Everyone’s lawns should look like the guy’s down the street — all natural,” said Young. “It’s so much better for the world, and it’s pretty.”
To be sure, the native way takes a certain mindset, an acceptance that beauty need not conform to a clipped symmetry. Or it just takes a desire to see the prairie restored to what it was before asphalt, concrete and automobiles. Across Chicago and the suburbs, people in increasing numbers are ripping up their lawns in favor of something more wild.
Red Stem Native Landscapes in the Avondale neighborhood, which has been in business since 2013, has seen demand for its services soar — an average of about 28% each year since 2018. To date, the company has installed about 470 gardens, a company spokeswoman said. It typically takes up to three years for the plants to reach maturity.
A 2022 survey of 2,600 U.S. adults conducted jointly by the National Wildlife Federation and the National Gardening Association found a similar growth in interest in natural plantings. Among other findings, the number of people planning to convert a portion of their lawn to a native landscape had doubled from 9% in 2019 to 19% in 2021. About 25% of people bought native plants, up from 17% in 2020, according to the survey.
What accounts for the growing interest? The reasons are as myriad as the varieties of plants native to Illinois.
Some people hate mowing. Some love the oasis-in-the-city feeling that comes from having thickets of sound-absorbing plant life.
Betsy Seff, a Red Stem ecological landscape designer, said the residential native plant movement has really taken off in the past 15 years or so. “There was a perception that the native plants only belonged in natural areas and couldn’t really fit in a residential context. People are starting to turn around that idea and are really looking for something more interesting, more sustainable,” Seff said.
Others want to do more — in their own corner of the world — to protect the environment.
Hallie Palladino, a playwright who lives with her family in the Edgewater Glen neighborhood, said she fell in love with the nature preserve areas of Winnemac Park on the North Side several years ago and wanted to recreate the setting on a smaller scale. The Palladinos had native plants installed about four years ago.
“I wanted to do something that was natural; I didn’t want chemicals. We drink the water from Lake Michigan. So we’re very aware of what we put into the water because we’re getting it right back out of the tap,” Palladino said.
Satinover frames his thoughts in more blunt terms.
“An environmental catastrophe is looming that I think not too many people are paying much attention to…,” said Satinover. “Getting into the environmental movement, I thought the best way to address that was to show what native plants would look like.”
Satinover, who lives in his Oak Park home with his wife, Luisa DiPietro, had Red Stem put in the native plants about four years ago. Repeated trips to The Morton Arboretum’s Schulenberg Prairie offered inspiration.
“We just became enamored with it,” he said. “The downside to a lawn is that you have to maintain it. You have to cut the grass, you have to fertilize it, you have to weed it with chemicals or by hand. You have to water it constantly or else it goes dormant and dries out.”
That’s not to say that native plants require no maintenance. But because the plants are native — and want to grow here — there’s less of a struggle to get them to thrive.
“There are fewer things to do with chemicals,” Seff said. “You don’t have to have someone come every week with the loud equipment and the buzzing and the fumes. It’s more of an oasis in your home landscape.”
It doesn’t come cheap. A limited conversion at the front of a house can run $5,000-$10,000, Seff said. Taking out the entire front yard might cost the homeowner $15,000-$20,0000, she said. Red Stem will come to do periodic maintenance, with a $70 per hour fee (plus a $10 travel fee).
So at this point, you might be thinking: Wouldn’t I achieve the same effect if I just stop mowing my lawn or pulling weeds?
“Sometimes we have to correct the perception that you can do that — that you can stop cutting the grass and just let nature take over — because unfortunately what tends to come in first is a bunch of invasive plants that are not particularly good for wildlife or anything else and also look terrible,” Seff said.
To show neighbors that the native plantings are intentional, Red Stem will occasionally build a swath of lawn into a design. “Because nobody wants to feel like their neighbor is letting their property just go wild,” Seff said.
Alexander Barrentine, who lives in Morton Grove, wanted a more natural garden because, he said, “I really hate mowing.”
But he needed to keep some grass to allow his greyhound to play.
The installation cost him about $18,000. Barrentine, a software engineer, says the obsession with lawns in the United States is a “Biblical thing taken too far.”
“This idea of expressing dominance over nature,” he said.
When Barrentine, 53, is standing near the bottom of his backyard, he is all but hidden among the shrubs and flowers. “I feel like I’ve shepherded in a thing of beauty into the world,” he said.
To those who might say that what he has is really just an overgrown garden, he responds: “F— ’em.”
As for Satinover, he hasn’t quite given up on the dream that others will follow his example. “I’m not proselytizing,” he said. “I’m happy enough that they tolerate it.”