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| Barbara Tubbs admires the flowers in her grass-free yard in Zellwood, Fla. Amy Green |
In Florida, lukewarm welcome for drought-resistant landscaping
The lawn-free look conserves water, but takes some getting used to for those accustomed to manicured grass.
By Amy Green | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the August 17, 2007 edition
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Zellwood, Fla. - Barbara Tubb's entire yard is a garden of colorful plants and flowers. Palmetto. Pungent-smelling blue basil. And her favorite: bright white cat whiskers. Buttressed by pine needles, the yard looks to one neighbor like a fire hazard.
Inspired by environmentalism, rising water bills, and her husband's support before he died, Ms. Tubbs hired a landscape architect to design her new drought-resistant yard. The homeowner's association in the country club where she lives – a community of manufactured homes in suburban Orlando – resisted her save-water-and-the-planet attitude but eventually granted permission for her to tear out all her St. Augustine grass. Immediately, there was backlash from her neighbors; one even called the fire department.
In Florida, there seems to be little awareness of water as a limited resource, and why should there be? The state is mostly a lush, tropical landscape with lakes, rivers, and springs. Surrounded by ocean water, it gets pounded by hurricanes and tropical storms that, with other rainfall, dump up to 50 inches annually.
But some warn Florida's groundwater is nearing its limits. And people like Tubbs who uproot lush sod for less thirsty landscaping often don't get much support from their neighbors.
This summer's drought – the worst in the Southeast since record-keeping began in 1895 – has laid bare parts of Lake Okeechobee, the second-largest freshwater lake in the continental US behind Lake Michigan. It has also exposed permanent water problems in the eastern part of the nation, says Cynthia Barnett, a longtime Florida journalist and author of "Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S."
She and others warn that the state may soon face water wars once unique to the arid West, a situation that eventually could reach well beyond Florida as populations grow across the eastern United States and climate changes affect water availability.
"Florida will never be arid like Arizona, but it's certainly going to have the same water problems as Arizona has," says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an independent nonprofit research group based in Oakland, Calif. "Florida is reaching the limits of its natural water availability. The population is growing rapidly, and it's outstripping the natural endowment."
The average Floridian household consumes 174 gallons of water daily, using up to 75 percent of it to irrigate sod and landscaping. The sod of choice is St. Augustine – grass that dies without water. In this state of golf courses and country clubs, many homeowner's associations require that a certain percentage of a homeowner's yard is sod with St. Augustine, maintained to a specific shade of green, Ms. Barnett says.
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