By JIMMY ROGERS

Golden ragwort (Packera aurea) blooming in spring where there had once been turf grass.
Courtesy of Jimmy Rogers

When suburbia began to blossom across America in the 1950s, the mowed front lawn cemented itself as a part of the residential landscape. Now, new homeowners often tell me they look out of their front doors and wonder, what is it for?

Here in the greater Laurel area, rebate programs are springing up to help residents redefine their front yards to better suit their own vision of a beautiful, functional and sustainable landscape. The Prince George’s County Rain Check Rebate program, which is a collaborative initiative between the county and the Chesapeake Bay Trust (CBT), has added a new option called conservation landscaping, which offers a rebate for reducing your lawn and planting natives.

Backing up a little bit, why would the government pay people to plant gardens? As climate change makes our weather more extreme and as we replace absorbent forests and wetlands with buildings and roads, our storm water systems must take on more and more water during each severe storm. This causes roadways and low-lying areas to flood and fills waterways with silt from erosion. For most local governments, the cost of upgrading storm water systems is prohibitive, and few jurisdictions can keep up with the pace of development. Some local groups, including Laurel for the Patuxent, have called for halting new construction that destroys forests or wetlands, as this only worsens the source of the problem.

Instead, counties hungry for new construction are funding a group of best management practices, or BMPs, that slow down storm water, reduce flooding and limit erosion. While civil engineers have a large family of BMPs to choose from, homeowners tend to divert water from storm drains by either collecting rainwater in rain barrels or creating places where the water can soak into the ground. Rain gardens accomplish the latter by catching water and storing it in a shallow landscape depression until it can soak in. These gardens can be challenging to install, as they require both special drainage conditions and deep soil amendment to make sure water drains away over the following day.

What many homeowners may not realize is that most native gardens are also a form of BMP known as a conservation landscape. When native plants dig their roots into the soil, they open tiny crevices that water can follow. Over time, our deeper-rooted natives make the ground more porous, so that it will absorb the rain that falls directly on it and gain the capacity to take on additional water from other areas. Compared to other BMPs, conservation landscaping has few formal requirements, since the plants do most of the work, and is relatively easy to implement.

If you’d like to get a rebate for planting a conservation landscape at your Prince George’s County home, you’ll first need to identify an area for planting that is at least 250 square feet, ideally a spot that receives storm water but does not flood. The new planting needs to replace turf grass or invasive species (such nandina and barberry bushes). If it’s along the front edge of your property, your design must include some kind of visual cue, such as a mown strip of grass, low-growing plants, a hedge or a fence. This will communicate your intentionality to passersby, and ensure that plants won’t spill into the sidewalk.

Next, you’ll need to create a planting plan and species list to present to the CBT program manager who administers the program for the county. All of the plants must be native to the mid-Atlantic. The new Commercial Maryland Native Plants List from the University of Maryland Extension (tinyurl.com/3ec4shb8) is a great resource for plant information. You can also include edible plants, such as native blueberry or blackberry bushes, and even incorporate nonnative, noninvasive edible plants, such as asparagus, in up to 25% of the square footage.

It’s important to hold off on starting your project until CBT has made an initial site visit and approved your plan. If everything goes well, the whole process takes about six weeks. Once your plan has been approved, you can remove (or smother) the turf grass and existing plants, then purchase new plants and plant them according to your plan. CBT will make a follow-up visit, and you’ll be able to turn in your receipts. Right now Prince George’s County offers rebates for up to $5 per square foot, with a lifetime property maximum of $6,000 for all rebates combined. 

The rebate will cover most of your material costs. If you’re looking for some help with the planning, plant sourcing and planting, I recommend visiting the Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional directory (https://certified.cblpro.org/) to find a contractor, as they are specifically trained to build conservation landscapes and other BMPs. Based on past project budgets I’ve seen, the rebate might cover half the cost of a professional job.

There are many more details about the rebate program, so be sure to visit the rain check rebate website (tinyurl.com/e88fvc7n) and take a look at the conservation landscape fact sheet.

This spring, if you have the space and the inclination, I hope you’ll take advantage of a conservation landscaping program.

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Jimmy Rogers is an avid native gardener in the city of Laurel.