For years the city of Westminster has urged residents to tear out their high-water turf lawns and replace them with low-water alternatives. The city’s web page on water conservation recommends that residents buy specific packages of plants for “water-wise gardens” that include various flowers and ornamental grasses. The city also links to its “water conservation / efficiency plan” and its “lawn replacement program.”
So you’ll never guess what happened after my wife and I spent hundreds of hours, hundreds of dollars, and gallons of sweat over the past few years tearing out our high-water turf lawn in our front yard and replacing it with a beautiful, low-water pollinator garden, filled with thousands of flowers in peak season, butterflies, and bees of various sorts.
Yep. A city code enforcer drove by, declared our hard-won flowers and ornamental grasses to be “weeds,” and demanded that we cut them down. Sheesh!
True, after the intense heat of July and early August, many of our flowering plants had lost their petals. The purple globes of flowers of our milkflowers (sometimes uncharitably called “milkweed”), plants essential to Monarch butterflies, had turned to pods. Rolling into late summer, our yard was merely pretty with scattered flowers, not stunningly gorgeous, as it had been after the Spring rains. Still.
After a lot of stress, a couple of restless nights, and several hours of correspondence with city code enforcement, my wife and I felt like city representatives finally started to see our point of view. We’re hopeful that the matter now has been put firmly behind us. We agreed we needed to cut out some grass and flowers growing in the crack between the sidewalk and the curb.
This is not just my problem. As the Front Range continues to grow in population and the climate continues to heat up, we’re only going to face increasing pressures on our water supplies. As people increasingly look to low-water alternatives to traditional high-water turf grasses that frankly never made much sense for a lot of purposes in Colorado, elected officials from cities on up to the state legislature need to work on ways to protect low-water pollinator gardens.
Cities should focus on neighborly neighborhoods
As I explained to city code enforcement, my family lives in a working-class neighborhood. We intentionally do not live in an HOA because we do not want to deal with a bunch of busy-bodies who continually hassle their neighbors over petty offenses. We’re busy working and raising our families and we don’t have time for such nonsense. The vibe that I sense around my neighborhood is, to quote vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, “Mind your own damn business.”
That doesn’t mean anything goes. City government has a legitimate role to play in making neighborhoods neighborly. For example, there’s a rogue elm tree growing in my neighborhood that is blocking a stop sign and pushing up the tax-funded curb by the street. There was a yard near where I live with wildly out of control noxious weeds. In egregious cases, yes, the city needs to intervene. This is a part of government’s legitimate role to protect property rights.
At the same time, residents should not be at the mercy of nosy, out-of-touch code enforcers who most likely do not even live in the neighborhood. I have a simple rule-of-thumb for city governments: If none of a person’s immediate neighbors care about the person’s yard, and if nothing in the yard poses a demonstrable and substantial danger to anyone else, then the city should, to again invoke Walz, mind its own damn business. Generally, if you can’t find several neighbors in the area who care about the alleged problem at hand, then it probably ain’t a real problem.
In the worst cases, people try to weaponize city codes to hassle their neighbors over personal grudges. I probably could find some code violation or other at around 90 percent of the houses within a mile of my family’s place. I have never called code enforcement on anyone, nor would I except in longstanding egregious cases that clearly adversely affect the broader neighborhood. Generally I believe in talking with neighbors, not sicking bureaucrats on them. But I think you can see how a neighborhood misanthrope could use the codes and their enforcers as a means to pursue personal resentments.
Cities absolutely have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that city codes and their enforcement are not arbitrary, capricious, discriminatory, or retaliatory.
Officials should protect pollinator gardens
I have another suggestion for city officials and, if they won’t do it, for state legislators as well: Protect pollinator gardens. Specifically, they should generate an extensive “safe” list of flowering plants and ornamental grasses such that, if someone grows them, city code enforcers clearly know it’s “hands off.” (“Weeds,” indeed!)
I concede room for tightening up the distinction between “turf” and ornamental grasses. Again, Westminster explicitly advises residents to replace high-water turf grasses with yards that include flowers and tall-growing ornamental grasses. But Westminster’s code is ambiguous as to the difference, giving an opening to nosy neighbors and code enforcers to needlessly hassle people over their ornamental grasses.
In my view, none of the grasses in my front yard are “turf.” They are all ornamental. We have them growing in our yard, interspersed with flowers, because they look awesome, and because they provide some shade protection for lower-growing plants, such as clover. This results in less need to water. Which, again, is something Westminster claims to want to encourage.
If you look at the city code, section 8-1-13(C), you will find the following text: “Turf: Shall be defined as a grouping of grasses that grow in very close proximity to form a living surface at the ground plane. Turf is generally an area of the ground plane intended to be/or could be walked on and, when regularly mowed, forms a dense growth of leaf blades and root. It shall be unlawful for any person to cause, maintain, or permit to remain any turf in excess of six inches in height.”
Well, none of my grass is “intended” to be walked on. It’s intended to look nice and to provide some shade for my clover. Defining “turf” as what “could be walked on” is ridiculous; practically any material thing “could be walked on.” What does “very close proximity” mean in this context, and who gets to decide? The blades of the tall-growing ornamental grasses that the city explicitly recommends that people buy and plant grow in “close proximity,” but evidently the city does not intend its code to outlaw all ornamental grasses. So this ends up being the sort of intentionally ambiguous code prone to abuse by hateful neighbors or overzealous code enforcers.
The broader point is, do any of my neighbors care about how close in proximity the blades of my ornamental grasses grow? I rather doubt it. Indeed, my wife and I have gotten a lot of compliments from neighbors about our yard. And if ornamental grasses really are a problem worthy of tax-financed code enforcement efforts, then let’s have some clarity so that home owners and city employees know what the codes mean.
Don’t tread on people’s low-water pollinator yards. People who love beautiful plants will thank you. People who care about water conservation will thank you. And the bees and the butterflies will think you too.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
