Almost every article about native plants and lawns is against lawns. If you have read a few, you already know the tone: the lawn is a monoculture, it drinks water, it feeds nothing, tear it out.
I am not going to tell you that, because I do not think it is true of every lawn, and because I do not think it helps. Someone with a dog needs somewhere for the dog. Someone who has people over needs somewhere to put a blanket down. A child who plays outside needs ground that does not take skin off a knee. If the honest choice is between a small patch of soft ground and covering an outdoor living space in gravel or pavers, then the lawn wins, and it is not close. Gravel and pavers are hot, they are dead, and they hold the day’s heat and give it back to you in the evening exactly when you wanted to sit outside.
So: you are allowed to want a lawn. What is worth changing is what the lawn is made of, and how much of it there is.
What to actually ask of a lawn
When people ask me what to plant instead of grass, I think they are usually asking about six things at once. Written out, the list is short:
- It takes being stepped on
- It is native, so it belongs to the place and the insects here recognise it
- It is low maintenance, which mostly means low water and infrequent mowing
- It is reasonably flat
- It looks good
- It feeds pollinators
Nothing does all six perfectly. What follows is three plants that each do most of them, and an honest account of where each one gives way.
Turkey tangle frogfruit
Phyla nodiflora. If you want one recommendation and no more reading, this is it.
It is a low, spreading, mat-forming plant, native across much of California, and in summer it covers itself in small flowers about the size of a pencil eraser. Bees find them from a long way off. That is the part nobody expects: you replace a lawn with something that hums.
The thing I like most about it is seasonal. Every conventional lawn in the Bay Area looks its worst in late summer and autumn, right when you are outside the most, and the frogfruit is in flower then. It wants far less water than turf once it is established.
Now the honest part, because this is where the internet disagrees with itself. Some nurseries describe frogfruit as tolerating foot traffic and being a good lawn substitute. Others say it does not tolerate regular foot traffic and is better thought of as something you look at rather than something you walk on. Both of those are easy to find in one search, and I would rather tell you that than write past it.
What I can tell you is what has happened in our own garden, which is one data point and should be read as one: our patch has been walked on through two summers and has held. It is not a football pitch. It gets ordinary use, the sort a path and a sitting-out area get, on garden soil, in mostly sun, and it went in well before anyone started walking on it.
That last detail is probably where the contradiction lives. A mat that has had a full season to root is a different plant from one that went in eight weeks ago. If you try it, give it that season before you ask anything of it, and be honest with yourself about how much traffic your ground really gets. If the answer is a dog running the same line twenty times a day, no ground cover on this list will survive it and you want a path.
Red fescue
Festuca rubra, for someone who wants actual grass and is not going to be talked out of it. It is native, and it is the closest thing on this list to what you are picturing.
It asks more of you than the frogfruit does: more water, more maintenance. In exchange you get something that reads unmistakably as a lawn.
The single most useful thing I know about growing it is when to mow. Mow it before the seed heads come up. Once a grass starts putting energy into making seed, it takes that energy out of the foliage, and the whole planting goes strawy and tired looking. Cut it before that happens and it stays green and soft. This one piece of timing makes more difference than anything else you will do.
One expectation to set now, because it is the reason people are disappointed by fescue: it is a bunchgrass. It grows in clumps and spreads slowly from those clumps. It does not run sideways and knit into a solid carpet the way Bermuda does. Nobody tells you this, you plant it imagining a lawn, and what arrives is a meadow of tufts. Knowing that in advance changes it from a failure into a look, and it is a good look, but it is not turf.
You can buy it as sod or as starter plants. Sod is faster and more expensive. Starters are cheaper and ask you to be patient.
Strawberries
Wood strawberry or beach strawberry, depending mostly on how close to the coast you are, and then on your soil and how much water you have. Beach strawberry is the tougher, glossier, more coastal one. Wood strawberry is happier with a bit of shade and a bit more moisture.
Lead with the deer, because everyone near deer asks. Strawberries grow to six or eight inches, and deer graze them back down to the ground. The first time you see it happen it looks like a disaster.
It is not. It is the plant doing the job. The deer get foliage they actually want, which means they are eating that instead of something you would rather keep, and the grazing keeps the strawberries at lawn height without you doing anything. In a garden where deer are a fact of life, this turns the usual complaint into the mechanism. You have effectively outsourced the mowing.
If you have no deer, you mow or you let it grow a little shaggy, and either is fine.
Getting started
Starters or sod. Sod gives you a finished surface immediately and costs accordingly. Starter plants cost much less and spread to fill the gaps, and how fast they close up depends on spacing, water and how good your soil is. For frogfruit and strawberries, starters are the normal way in. For fescue, either works.
The first summer is the one that asks something of you. Everything here is described as drought tolerant, and everything here is drought tolerant once established, which is not the same sentence. In the first year the roots are still shallow and the plant cannot yet reach the water lower down. Water it that first summer. From the second, you will be surprised how little it needs.
Start smaller than you think. Take the piece of ground you actually stand on, plant that, and see how it behaves through a summer and a wet winter before committing the whole garden. This is also the cheapest way to find out which of these three suits your particular patch, which no article can tell you.
Have another one?
This list is three plants long because these are the three I have grown and watched. There are certainly others that belong on it, and the people most likely to know are the ones who have already tried something in Bay Area soil and watched it either hold up or fail.
If that is you, email hello@whrfund.org and tell me what you planted, where, and how it did. I will add the good ones to this article with your name on them if you want it there. Failures are as useful as successes, and considerably rarer to find written down.
If you would rather do something with a butterfly attached, we also give away free California pipevine plants, which is a different job from a lawn but the same idea: the plants that belong here are the ones that hold everything else up.