Will grass lose ground?
by Franke James
Dave Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, in the Toronto Star June 19/07, said, “The weather is sucking us dry… It’s going to be dry, dry, dry and warm, warm, warm.” The scarcity of rain has prompted water advisories and rationing in some areas of York Region.
What I observe as I walk around Toronto, is lots of grass quickly turning brown. I need to find a drought resistant grass for our front yard. A sign of the times.
Sounds like Australia is a few years ahead of you.
They used to call our state (Victoria) the Garden State. That’s what it said on all our car licence plates. And we didn’t bother with drought-resistant grass. That was back in the late 70s and early 80s.
Then in the late 80s people started having problems keeping their grass green, so we all switched over to drought-resistant varieties. We dug up our English lawns and replanted from scratch.
Now, after the worst ‘drought’ on record (the government is still having problems calling it climate change), the drought-resistant grass is dead, and we’re all spending the winter putting in what are called ‘water-wise gardens’ – gardens that don’t need any watering at all, and that tolerate desert conditions well.
I think you’d be smart to skip the middle stage, and start planting olives and citrus groves. As for us, our ‘Garden State’ is little but a memory.