The area in front of Janet and Jeffrey Crouch's house in Columbia , Maryland , does not look usual for their neighborhood .
That is because the Crouches do not have a grass lawn .
Instead , they have some small trees and many native plants .
Lawns are areas around a house or in a park that are covered with short grass .
In recent years , support for replacing lawns with native plants has been increasing in the United States .
The process is called rewilding .
In fact , the number of Americans planning to turn part of their lawn to native wildflowers doubled between 2019 and 2021 .
By 2021 , it rose to 19 percent .
Paul Robbins is the writer of Lawn People : How Grasses , Weeds , and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are .
He said that most people would prefer not to have lawns .
“But they feel that they need to have them , or that they can't do anything about it .”
He added that many homeowners feel they should have lawns to please their neighbors .
It can be costly to keep a lawn looking good and green .
But the Crouches had to spend much more money for the right not to have one .
People living in a house next to them complained to their homeowner's association , or HOA .
The neighbors did not like that the Crouches did not have a grass lawn .
HOAs can make rules about the plants that homeowners in a neighborhood are permitted to grow .
Many HOAs require grass lawns .
The HOA ordered the Crouches to pull out their native plants and put in grass .
However , they refused .
“We knew we were doing things that were beneficial for the environment ,” said Janet Crouch .
She told VOA that it seemed wrong to put in only grass , which she called an environmental dead zone .
Lawns are called environmental dead zones in part because they provide no food or shelter for wildlife .
They also do not support pollinators like birds , bees , and butterflies .
Bee populations have been getting smaller in North America and may be getting smaller around the world .
Ted Steinberg is the writer of American Green : The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn .
He said there are other reasons that lawns are bad for the environment .
He said they require a lot of water and chemicals .
Large amounts of water can remove nutrients from the soil .
Steinberg said that after the water removes the nutrients , people buy even more chemicals to put on their lawns .
Scientists say some of these chemicals might cause cancer and other health problems .
Nancy Lawson is the writer of The Humane Gardener and Wildscapes .
She is also Janet Crouch's sister and the person who urged the Crouches to put in native plants .
The Crouches ’ battle against their HOA took three years .
They say they spent $60,000 fighting to keep their natural garden .