“What if lawns were better?” is a deceptively complex question. Its easy to wish a lawn was better, but it’s way harder to imagine all the possibilities. Our research has us approaching the topic from a variety of different angles.
Some of the big questions include:
How can we make existing lawns better?
While the idea of replacing all lawns everywhere is exciting, in practice that is very expensive and a lot of labor. We are interested in exploring what options work that are an easier change. Easier small changes at scale can make a huge impact.
One of the things lawns lack, ecologically speaking, is flowers to feed pollinators. The big option already out there for flowering lawns, white clover, adds flowers for bees while staying short and tolerating mowing. That’s a good start, but what if we could do that with native flowers instead?
We are testing both seeding and directly planting mature native flowers into existing Chicago Park District lawns, seeing if they can put up with mowing. Thus far, we’ve gotten a number of them to bloom short and can’t wait to share more as we learn more!
Additionally, our graduate student Libby Shafer is testing this out in parkways all over Evanston with her Bees on the Block program. To learn more, check out:
Sites: Greenhouse (2025), Burnham (2026+), McKinley (2026+), Bees on the Block (2026+)
Lead Expert: Libby Shafer, MS, PhD in progress
Before we started testing seeding natives into lawn in the wild, we first needed to confirm if it actually works! In a greenhouse experiment led by PhD student Libby Shafer, we tested seeding forty different native plants into pots of mature lawn grass. Libby found that the vast majority of the natives were able to germinate, a surprise to us all! More information will be available as she writes her dissertation.
Sites: Greenhouse (2025), Burnham (2026+), McKinley (2026+), Bees on the Block (2026+)
It’s one thing to be able to germinate in lawn. It’s a whole other thing to survive the amount of mowing that most lawns endure. We know that many of our native wildflowers can flower after an occasional mow, a periodic mow on the edges of trails, a chelsea chop, or a bison graze, but can they endure that every week for a whole growing season? At these sites, we are testing that to find out!
What do existing city park landscapes currently do for us?
All of these project take place at five different parks: Horner Park, Lincoln Park, Northerly Island, Burnham Park, and Jackson Park.
In theory, all the literature points towards native plants should be better for the environment and people than lawn. But does this actually happen in reality?
Summer 2025, the Rethinking Lawns team collected data at five different city parks to determine if this is really true. At each site, we collected data at lawns, lawn alternatives, and prairie natural areas. Usually, when researchers consider questions like this, they focus on a few narrow traits to study. For this project, we went all in and collected data on:
Lead Experts: Rebecca Barak, PhD and Nadav Mouallem, MS
A wider variety of plants can support a wider variety of wildlife and a more resilient ecosystem. It’s also more interesting for us to look at!
When you think of lawns, you may picture a monoculture of a single grass. In reality, lawns can be pretty diverse spaces. Similarly, prairie restorations aren’t just one suite of plants repeated at every site. In order to understand what is happening functionally at each of these parks, we had to study what was growing.
Lead Expert: Rebecca Tonietto, PhD
Pollinator populations struggle to find food among acres of uniform lawns. Adding flowers to our landscapes can help support their survival.
In theory, our native pollinators should prefer our native plants and, in general, the literature agrees that with more flowers, you’re likely to find more pollinators. Given all our sites have different numbers and types of floral resources for pollinators, where is most of the action happening?
Preliminary data is showing what we’d hoped: the more diverse and native the floral options at hand, the more pollinators and the more types of pollinators there are present.
Lead Expert: Lauren Umek, PhD and Alison Branz, MS
Plants take in carbon from the air through photosynthesis. Their roots & microorganisms that live among them store that carbon underground. How much of this is going on in city parks?
Urban soils are pretty weird. They are called “technosol” which just means soils build by technological means. Our sites include landfill from the Great Chicago Fire, a clay-capped brick factory, dredged-up lakebed, a former road, and a whole mishmash of landfill. These difference in base material and historic use means every square foot can be completely different.
In theory, plants stabilize soils, sequester carbon and other resources into the ground, and support biodiverse communities of arthropods, microbes, fungi and other forms of life. The thing is, this doesn’t happen instantly and it doesn’t happen the same everywhere. We are collecting data on all of the above at our different parks to learn what’s going on underground.
Lead Experts: Natalie Love, PhD and Coral Brock, MS in progress
Between paved surfaces, tall buildings, and dense living, cities are “heat islands”: self-generated higher temperature spaces than more open and green spaces. While we know that more green spaces and more trees help cool cities off, we know less about the impact of plants shorter than trees. Dr. Natalie Love and Coral Brock have worked to analyze over 4 million datapoints of temperature and humidity. They are comparing the climate patterns in prairies, lawn alternatives, and lawns against paved surfaces to see how much they cool (or heat!) the city around them. Their results are complicated and will be shared in Coral Brock’s upcoming thesis.
Lead Expert: Lauren Umek, PhD
Lawns have wimpy roots compared to our native plants. Deeper, denser root systems help water seep into the ground instead of flowing over the surface and into our overwhelmed stormwater infrastructure. Do the plants and soils of our different parks have a big impact on how fast water can flow into the ground?
Water infiltration and soil qualities share a lot of the same variables:
-Plants: What are the species? How old are the plantings?
-Soil: What is the soil actually made of? How has it been disturbed lately?
Because of these complicated concerns, we have had to collect water infiltration rates at our sites multiple times & repetitions to truly understand what is going on.
Our preliminary results are showing that there are indeed differences between plantings’ water infiltration, but the somewhat bad news is that site maturity has a major influence on water infiltration. Plants need time to mature in place and spread their roots before they make a big impact.
What could our lawns become?
Replacing lawns means planting something new! With all the world of plants to choose from, what makes most sense in spaces that used to be lawns?
Sites: Greenhouse
Lead Expert: Alison Branz, MS
A popular thing being marketed right now is “ecograss” “low-grow” “no-mow” grass. Unlike the Kentucky bluegrass and tall fescue commonly used in Midwestern yards, this is a mix of short fescues: chewings, fine, sheep, and red fescues. In theory, roots go deeper, plants grow slower, you need to mow and water less.
Alison Branz led the experiment to analyse how fine fescue mixes like this stand up against native grasses in the greenhouse. Her paper is currently in review, but the results were surprisingly positive for fine fescue. We’ll share more later as her work is published.
Site: Uptown Natural Area, Sedge Way at Chicago Botanic Garden
Across all of our different research sites, we have 33 different grasses and grasslike plants planted in dense monocultures: 8 grasses, 2 rushes, and 23 sedges. Each has their own preferences for sun, soil, moisture, and how nicely they can behave like lawns. Some tend to form clumpy mounds, others more lawn-like and continuous. We’ve been able to dip into the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Dixon Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie Seed Bank to grow out rare sedges like the state-endangered Carex aurea.
We are continuing to document how these species behave and look in different conditions at our various sites.
Site: McKinley Park and Research Plots at Chicago Botanic Garden
A big part of the Rethinking Lawns project is about recognizing that lawns can be replaced by a huge variety of different planting types, or as we like to call it, The Menu of Options. Part of what makes lawns so expensive and labor-intensive is the desire to have one single option that works everywhere. Instead, we propose lawn alternative plantings that are more responsive to their location and people’s needs.
One place where this plays out is when land managers make decisions on what they should plant at a new site.
