It occurred to me that flowers are like the virtue signaling of plants. If it flowers people are apt to think it's deliberate. If it's merely green, who knows..

It occurred to me that flowers are like the virtue signaling of plants. If it flowers people are apt to think it's deliberate. If it's merely green, who knows... is it the product of deliberate effort or just laziness? (Is a natural forest the product of laziness?) The orange daylily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerocallis_fulva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerocallis_fulva) is a way to cheat this system, you can be incredibly lazy but they do technically flower. I read a survey somewhere that modern expectations now are that if you have 25% (some places 15%) of your yard as turf your neighbors will be happy. 0% indicates you aren't "doing" something, just letting things grow. One option not really mentioned in the article is to just let things grow, and only weed out annoying things (small trees poorly placed, things with thorns or bristles, etc). Not mentioned of course because you'll get in trouble even outside of a HOA. I'll admit, as much as I want to be (and I think I am) tolerant, I do have a dislike of weedy tree overgrowth. A neighbor is dedicated to doing no lawn maintenance, and the result is not particularly lush or interesting, just a ground layer that's relatively bare beneath small trees and bushes that are all competing. If they avoided that, and had primarily vascular plants, I think the result would be more lush, representing a better natural landscape. There's a kind of design challenge here that I don't know quite how to solve. Lawns are genuinely usable in a way that I appreciate. A more trendy approach is to add a bunch of hardscape or deck and then plant the rest... is that really better? Or, for instance, composting yard waste on-site helps support all the organisms that make use of that organic matter. People complain that it's also a great place for mice to nest. Which it is... and is that bad? I tend to change my mind when they try to come into the house in the fall. Overgrowth can be a hiding place and a safety concern. Of course lots of wildlife would like to hide, and so that very problem is also a feature. There's a challenge between having control and letting nature take its course... and neither is really right, and I believe good design goes beyond simple compromise. I don't know... something I'd love to work on in my retirement.