Book Review: Suburban Safari

 Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn
by Hannah Holmes

Miranda's review Nov 25, 11

 

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This fun mainstream nonfiction book takes environmental awareness to a new level. Hannah Holmes resolves to spend one year examining, in minute detail, her yard. She brings in experts to help her learn about some areas of her yard (entomolgy anyone?) and does historical research into the past life of her yard. Hannah Holmes writes in a very down-to-earth style that is extremely easy to follow. She shares her personal thoughts intertwined with the stories of the "characters" found in the yard. You'll never look at your yard the same way again. My favorite take-away message - mowing infrequently and not worrying about weeds in the yard is an environmentally healthy behavior. Go green! :)

Now for some fun photos of my yard: 

LOL - looking back, I found this excerpt from one of my very first blog posts last summer.  See how I reference the book, Suburban Safari.  :)

"Yes, that is definitely some tall grass.  And for those of you that are observant, you'll notice the grass in the foreground is fairly short.  If we zoomed back, you'd see patches of tall grass all over my yard, with most of it being fairly short.  I call this my Freedom Lawn.  I found the term in a book once, and have adopted it for my own.  The idea is that you keep your lawn free from chemicals, and so lots of different organisms can make it their habitat.  I think the idea has ecological principles.  For me, whatever gives me less interaction with my lawn is the way to go, so my usual practice is to scalp it about every two weeks, come what may.  Looking at this, it appears it is time once again to do battle with the lawn mower and tackle the yard.
. . . . . . . Lawn mowing really doesn't take that much time, if I can get the mower started (my next mower will be a key start {turns out is wasn't} ).  As I'm mowing, I notice all the different types of small grasses and weeds that grow short to the ground.  They grow 2-3" tall, so have adapted to survive under the range of the lawn mower blades.  One species has pretty, tiny yellow flowers right now.  Another - white.  The flower stalks are all sacrificed to the lawn mower blade.  Most of them have a very quick blooming cycle, so will probably be able to get some other flowers up and pollinated by all the insects in my yard before the next mowing cycle.  My thoughts turn to our school guinea pigs, Tallula and Bella.  Now that it's warm, I need to start bringing them out to graze in the yard.  They would surely enjoy all these different types of grasses {turns out they didn't}.  And now it's done, and the yard looks smooth and green:"