How to grow an eco-friendly lawn in Chicago

The American lawn, the pride and joy of homeowners everywhere, needs more tender, loving and ecological care.

That is the message of Lawn Nation, an exhibit opening Friday at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. This means using less water, chemicals and gasoline for its maintenance.

"If you walk away with one thought after seeing [the exhibit]," said Shane DuBow, strategic projects manager at the Nature Museum, "our hope would be that lawn is a choice, and that this is not a biological imperative."

The exhibit, which comprises work from more than thirty local artists, offers many interactive ways to learn about proper lawn care.

Artists Daphne Firos and Brian Peters spent more than a month putting together a display of 1,700 empty water bottles, or the equivalent of 250 gallons of water-what the average American uses for a lawn sprinkler system in one hour.

"The water bottles is just a way of putting that 250 gallons into a unit that someone can recognize," Firos said. "When you say 250 gallons, people can't really understand what that really means. But then when you think what it is when you're holding a water bottle-1,700 of those, it's a lot."

"Gimme Green," a thirty-minute documentary that is part of the exhibit, reveals the water shortages many parts of the nation already experience. In Las Vegas, for instance, the city pays residents $1 per square foot of grass they tear out of their yards and replace with artificial turf, to reduce demand for water. In hot, dry climates, more than 70 percent of a person's water usage goes to watering the grass.

Many times, there is nothing natural about lawns, but there could be. Take, for instance, the museum's green roof. Designers took care to use local plants that have deep root systems, need little water, and require no pesticides.

In front of its entrance the museum has newly-planted gardens showing a range of yard styles, from open and sunny to leafy and shady.

"If you are going to go ahead and water it [your lawn], why not use it to grow flowers or grow vegetables or grow medicinal plants?" said Jill Riddell, vice president of exhibitions and strategic initiatives at the museum.

A lawn doesn't have to be a monoculture.

"Dandelions and clover-it actually is a sign of health," DuBow said. "Because that means it [the lawn] has not been treated to wipe everything out."

There are no regulations on how homeowners use fertilizers for their lawns, which environmentalists suspect are used too often and in excessive quantities. Of the 30 most used pesticides, 17 are routinely found in groundwater, and nearly half of common lawn pesticides are possible carcinogens, according to the EPA.

In addition to artwork, movies, and 'fun facts', the exhibit has an area to play croquet.

"It's [the exhibit] not meant to be a total slam on lawn-because lawn does a lot of good things as well," DuBow said. "It's hard to play soccer on sharp rocks. Lawn gives us barbeques and picnics, community gathering space. So a piece like the croquet is a great example of that. But then, it also has a huge environmental impact. And there are more sustainable ways of keeping a lawn."

The exhibit will run through September 7. The artists' work will also be viewable online at www.naturemuseum.org.