DAVID BENNER hasn’t watered his lawn since the Kennedy administration. He hasn’t mowed it, either. And it’s doing just fine. On a late-April afternoon, the two-acre property surrounding his ranch house in Bucks County was a carpet of green, uniformly lush and velvety under a canopy of shade trees.
Mr. Benner, 78, a retired professor of ornamental horticulture, is also a longtime practitioner and advocate of what he calls “the moss approach” to lawn maintenance. “Every time I give a lecture, I go into this spiel: get rid of your grass, and grow moss,” he said. “And now it’s finally gaining momentum.”
For more than a century, moss has been anathema to homeowners and gardeners. Type “moss” and “lawn” on an Internet search engine and you’ll find more ways to kill it than create it.
But in recent years, this humble, hardy plant, which has been around for at least 450 million years, has been growing in popularity as an alternative to the traditional lawn. Tim Currier, the owner of Sticks and Stones Farm in Newtown, Conn., which has specialized in selling moss for 10 years, estimated that his sales are up 30 percent just in the last year. And Celeste Kennedy, who owns Rolling Hill Farm in Green Bay, Va., reported a 40 percent sales increase, with growing interest in moss from both homeowners and businesses.
It’s not hard to see why. Moss, which grows fast and hugs the ground, prevents soil erosion. Its density repels weeds. Deer do not snack on it. It can be walked on. Even when it looks dead, a splash of water can restore it to emerald health within minutes. It doesn’t need fertilizer (lacking a root system, it takes nutrients from water and air). All it needs, in fact, are shade, moisture — though not large amounts of water — and what most gardeners would regard as poor-quality soil.
According to an informal survey by the American Society of Landscape Architects, many of its most prominent members predict that the use of native and drought-resistant plants like moss as a sustainable substitute for grass will be a major design trend of 2008. “We’re definitely seeing more creative plantings, and moss is a great one,” said Nancy C. Somerville, the organization’s executive vice president, who attributes the trend in part to environmentalism, and in particular to growing concerns about water in much of the country.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly a third of all residential water is used for landscaping. “Here on the East Coast we had drought conditions for a large part of last summer,” Ms. Somerville said, “and it sounds like we’re going to get more of that with global warming.”
Although moss requires moisture, said Christine Cook, who owns Mossaics, a moss gardening business in Easton, Conn., and who lectures at the New York Botanical Garden, a moss lawn needs “a fraction, one percent or less” of the 10,000 gallons (beyond rainwater) that the E.P.A. estimates a suburban grass lawn drinks annually.
For 34 years, Mr. Benner has been giving tours of his property during the first two weeks of May, and it has become something of a mecca for those interested in moss gardening. Thousands of visitors have trod across his mossy paths, leaving barely a trace. (He can be reached at bigdavebigsue@hotmail.com; don’t wear high heels, he warned, or “you’ll sit in the car.”)
Moss gardens generally require very little care, but Mr. Benner’s is an extreme example. “I really don’t water,” he said, taking a seat at a picnic table in the shade of a beech tree. “I work with nature, and my philosophy is that things have to tough it out.”
It seems to be working. His yard is an oasis of flowering trees, native wildflowers and cool, rich moss, dotted with twinkling bluets. As he spoke, two fat frogs sat placidly nearby on moss-covered rocks next to a small fountain. “You’re looking at a garden here that’s practically no maintenance,” he said.
(He even manages to avoid raking leaves in autumn, by covering the moss with netting that collects the leaves. He then spends two weekends dumping the contents onto his compost pile.)
Mr. Benner first conceived of his moss lawn in the spring of 1962, when he bought the house with his wife, Sue, while working as a young botanist at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve in New Hope, Pa. (He later taught for two decades at Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, Pa.) Mr. Benner knew he didn’t want a grass lawn, having spent his youth in Ardmore, Pa., glumly mowing huge swaths of grass for his father.
But there was scant advice available on cultivating moss. The only book on moss his university library could track down was in Japanese.
He did know that moss, unlike grass, thrives in acidic soil. So he covered his lawn in an acidic combination of sulfur powder and aluminum sulfate. Three months later, he raked up the dead grass, leaving a vast expanse of exposed soil. Then he waited through the winter, hovering over his grand experiment. The following spring, moss began sprouting all over the property. “It was like magic,” he said. “I can still hardly believe it. Moss produces spores, and they just blew in from the air. Now I have 25 kinds, none of which I planted.”
This year, for the first time, Mr. Benner will be selling moss starter kits, containing four of the easiest-to-grow moss plants — fern, hair cap, rock cap and cushion — through Moss Acres, a 54-acre moss nursery in the Poconos, started by his son, Al Benner, in 2002.
Moss Acres, one of the country’s few specialty moss purveyors and, according to Al Benner, the largest (it was a source of moss for the atrium garden of The New York Times’s headquarters), is itself a sign of the intensifying interest in moss. The younger Mr. Benner said that in the company’s six years of business, sales have increased by about 30 percent annually. The company’s Web site, www.mossacres.com, draws a thousand visitors a day, he said, adding, “moss is starting to get its day in the shade, I guess you could say.”
There are approximately 12,000 varieties of moss in North America, and most of them require just shade, acidic soil and adequate moisture. Also, the moss bed must be kept free of leaves and debris (although a brief accumulation, like the one that Mr. Brenner gathers in his nets every fall, is all right). Other than that, Al Benner said, “the crummier the soil, the better it is for moss.”
Aside from its durability and environmental benefits, he attributes its popularity to nostalgia. “Everyone always says, ‘Oh, I remember when I was a kid, walking through the woods and seeing moss.’ It was probably wherever they grew up, because moss is everywhere. Moss takes people back to being a kid again.”
The elder Mr. Benner sometimes walks barefoot on it after a rain — “some sort of magical invigorating energy goes through you when you stand on a thick patch of wet moss,” he said — and both he and his wife say they enjoy lying down in a particularly inviting stretch of (dry) moss.
Moss enthusiasts are a small but passionate bunch. “I’ve had grown men confess to me that they used to play with their G.I. Joes in the moss,” Ms. Cook said. “You have no idea how many moss lovers are out there.”
T. J. Turgeon, an executive vice president of Modern Bank, a private bank in Manhattan for wealthy people, is one of them. He began growing moss four years ago, after walking in the woods around his vacation home in Shandaken, N.Y., and picking up little pieces to take back to his yard for a garden. Soon he was filling trash bags with the stuff.
“I’m having an absolute blast with it,” Mr. Turgeon said. “I’m great at a dinner party, because I can talk about moss and no one’s ever heard it before. People at work think I’m out of my mind.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t know if other people do this, but wherever I go, I take moss.” His garden is a patchwork quilt of mosses in different shades of green, from North Carolina, Canada, Denver, San Francisco and Connecticut.
Sallie Baldwin, a graphic designer who lives in Greenwich, Conn., has been a moss lover for 18 years, during which she and her husband, Foster Bam, have gradually turned their front yard into a moss lawn. “We have a lot of shade, because Greenwich is full of trees,” said Ms. Baldwin, who has swapped her own grass for patches of moss growing in the yards of several bemused neighbors.
There is one slight hitch. “You have to go out and pull the grass. When my neighbors walk by and I’m there pulling out the grass so the moss will grow, they think I’m a little crazy.”
Source: www.nytimes.com
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