Long Island’s lawn culture is weed infested. The act of mowing itself makes for an excellent seed dispersal mechanism on your property, and for the neighborhood. Municipalities all have their mowing crews for the many lawns in our public parks and spaces. Let’s look though at what is actually growing on these lawns: We are looking mostly at invasive weeds from all over the world, as the properties cross-contaminate each other.
- Garlic Mustard
- Mugwort
- Lesser Celandine
- Hairy Bittercress
- Broadleaf Plantain
- Chickweed
- Hawkweed
With the mowing, it all ends up looking green and flat, but also lifeless — an amalgam of invasive weeds.
Beyond the non-native grasses and weeds, our public spaces are infested with a host of other invasive trees, shrubs and vines. All our road medians are just seas of weeds now eurasian grasses, with Tree of Heaven, Japanese Knotweed, Multiflora Rose, Japanese Honeysuckle, Oriental Bittersweet, and English Ivy thrown in. Much is wind blown, or carried by birds, but mowing has played has helped to propagate Japanese Knotweed, which is perhaps the worst invasive on the planet. It is all over Long Island now and on Fire Island.


If you mow it, you only spread it. A plant native to Japan, where it grows at the base of volcanoes, its roots can burrow down seven feet into volcanic rock, or as they are finding out in England, into your foundation. When it comes to invasive plants on Long Island, we are badly in a battle we don’t even know we are fighting. We’ve yet to address this ecological disaster in any meaningful way.
Invasive Weeds — It’s Them Or Us!
Given the magnitude of the threat we are facing from invasive plants — along with the rest of the globe! — it is critical that Long Islanders today take a stand and fight for its environmental future. For this we will need state and federal aid (it is that bad, folks), but most importantly, we need every town on Long Island, Glen Cove and Long Beach, and The Shinnecock Nation, to be out fighting for local nature.
We encourage all to then to join The Dirty Dozen Campaign. It is really them or us, and this is no exaggeration. Right now, I am more concerned with local ecological collapse than climate change, though the latter helps to drive the former. We are watching local Nature being erased in real time, and we must and can stop it.
The Weeds Cost Extra
Similarly, landscaping services have little time to clean their machines between jobs. Everyone seems to be getting everyone else’s weeds. Take any plant identifying app and take a quick inventory as to what is growing in your yard. I use PictureThis! It’s an eye opener.
Start with the premise that Kentucky Blue Grass is actually Eurasian, and is considered invasive. Because it is invasive, it creates disturbed habitat. It is a monoculture, which means there is no resiliency when an opportunistic invasive plant gains a toehold. QED if you have a lawn you will have weeds. That in turn creates a whole industry for herbicides, which of course makes the whole mess worse. Since so called Kentucky Blue Grass has such water and fertilizer requirements, the resource drain and the environmental damage to our waters and soil is monumental.
There 40 million acres of lawn in this country “under cultivation” (second only to corn). One must ask the simple question, “Why?” The lawn is hostile to local wildlife. We must return Nature to our yards, or see it vanish forever.
No Mow Nonsense — No Weeds!
I understand the impulse for No Mow May. The aim is to give local insects and spring ephemerals a head start. Don’t mow down the ground bees! But this also gives various invasive plants an opportunity to grab hold. I assume that between March 1st into June, I am pulling weeds, the so-called 100 Days of Hell gardeners endure each year. Letting things go that long is not recommended, especially if the lawn / field has already been deemed predominantly invasive.
Second, if it’s No Mow May, why not the rest of the calendar? If the goal is to protect insect and plant populations, why mow at all? Why not replace your lawn with a native meadow? THAT’s a movement I can get behind! All these half-measures to preserve lawn culture. We need to give a portion of our land back to nature, and quickly.
Great work being done on the ground and on the airwaves to spread awareness! My backyard is a beautiful showcase of the efforts of the team at Spadefoot, and I can testify to the rewards. Birds, bees and butterflies!!
Although I’m long away from Long Island, I’m following your blog. Thanks for the great write up.