Grass in the top photo is treated with herbicides and nitrogen. The other grasses are not.

In 2007, I was a student at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania working my way towards a BA in Communications. I had a great biology professor there, Dr. Nancy Gift.

I was maybe 23 at the time, a little older than the average undergraduate. I took a crooked path through the university system. Anyway, Dr. Gift was unlike anyone I had ever met before. Dr. Gift was passionately earthy. She was not only a bio professor, she was, at the time, the Director of the Rachel Carson Institute, now a part of the Faulk School of Sustainability at Chatham.

I didn’t know anything about pesticides or herbicides before meeting Dr. Gift. I didn’t know anything about pesticides and herbicides, really until I read Silent Spring at her suggestion. What I learned in the 1962 science lit tour de force from Chatham Alum Rachel Carson ’29 shocked me.

Color me ignorant but I had no idea that our systems were so similar those of frogs. One alarming piece of research that Carson exposed was the study of frogs in a river that flowed through a major city in the United States. This river was the water supply for the city at the time of her writing. These frogs were showing up as hermaphrodites in alarming numbers. This same waterway was being heavily polluted by agrochemicals down river.

Pontefract Park - Sewickley, Pennsylvania

From then on, I’ve kept my antenna up and my ears open for research related to the harms of man-made chemicals used to kill naturally occurring weeds and insects. Am I an alarmist? I suppose. I admit, I was alarmed to find out how toxic these things can be, so I suppose I find it important to raise flags when appropriate.

That line has been difficult to see. Eleven years after reading Silent Spring, I was issued a Cease and Desist by our former HOA. I had been serving on the board as the Communications Chair for several months. I was also three months pregnant, with two toddlers and a dog. Our contact with the grass was on the heavy side for the neighborhood.

I resigned when the board refused to print my warning to stay off the grass after an herbicide spray. I was happy to lose the burden of arduous monthly meetings and countless emails but my obligation as a neighbor still weighed on me. As far as I knew, I was the only person other than the secretary who had ever seen the chemical safety sheets and knew what was being sprayed. I was the only neighbor who called the landscaping vendor we used to get the exact date of spray. My neighbor and friend had two little girls and was growing a small potted edible garden in her back yard. I felt obligated to share with her and other close neighbors what I had learned about Dimension 2E ( a crabgrass killer), Glyphosate and the other chemicals being used to keep our grass looking ship shape. After a couple days of word of mouth, I received a threatening phone call from the neighbor who took my place on the board. A few days later, I received the letter from the HOA lawyer.

Back to Dr. Gift. In 2009, she wrote her own book, a thought provoking yet approachable read called, A Weed by Any Other Name. Nancy is a mom, a scientist and a backyard gardener who teaches students and readers that a weed is a plant. The word ‘weed’ is assigned to a plant that is growing where one does not want it to grow. She gives some alternatives to the spray-away technique. One of her suggestions is a mind-shift. Affordable. Safe and maybe even healthy on multiple levels.

I walked through a large park outside of town today with my three young children. It’s four weeks into COVID-19 quarantine. The skies are blue, rare for 2020 in Western, Pennsylvania. There are robins everywhere and the traffic is low enough on the usually busy route 65 to hear Big Sewickley Creek rippling through the vast green field that is held down by seemingly ancient bleached sycamores.

Beneath us are countless teensy flowers. Tiny purple pansies. Micro daisies. Little pink and white lilly-like things. The kids, none of them over 36” from the ground are besotted. Weency little flowers, just their size! We pluck bouquets to bring ‘home’ with us.

We’re staying at my parents’ house while we renovate an old home north of Pittsburgh. They live in an HOA. All the homes receive the same monthly herbicide/nitrogen spray that we had in our neighborhood. My mom asked to withhold application on her yard after my experience but was told she couldn’t, the land in front of her house was HOA property. The yards are green, nary a weed in site.

The little bouquets today reminded me of the cost of those seemingly perfect green lawns. Weed killers don’t allow for tiny daisies or happy little lily impersonators found in the cropped yet otherwise unattended grasses of April.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say…

The Grass is Greener?