Designer Genevieve Gorder has a fairly blunt assessment of the American lawn: “The big green yard is outdated.” Her preferred alternative is a yard planted more generously with things like wildflowers, and she sums up the larger idea in an even better line: “Nature is the new luxury.”
For anyone who has watched the Front Range steadily trade Kentucky bluegrass for gravel, native grasses, boulders, flagstone, xeric perennials and patios, that feels pretty timely. Colorado homeowners have plenty of practical reasons to rethink lawn, from water use to maintenance, and the movement has accelerated enough that turf-replacement programs are now common along the Front Range. But Gorder’s comment raises a more interesting design question than simply how to get rid of grass.
What should replace it?
The answer is probably not a truckload of tan gravel.
Colorado State University Extension has a wonderfully direct line in its water-wise landscaping guidance: “Xeriscaping is not a rock pile.” That may sound like an odd thing to emphasize in an article about a stone supplier, but spend some time around good landscape designers and stone yards and the point becomes obvious. Rock is extraordinarily useful in a Colorado landscape. So are plants. So is shade. So are places to sit, paths that go somewhere, a little lawn where people actually use it and enough variation that the front yard doesn’t feel like the median of a commercial parking lot.
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With that in mind, consider these the new yard rules.
Stop Treating the Lawn as the Default
Gorder isn’t arguing that grass has suddenly become ugly. The more interesting part of “the big green yard is outdated” is the assumption behind it. For decades, the American yard started with lawn and everything else was added around the perimeter. There might be a flower bed against the house, one shade tree in front and perhaps some foundation shrubs, but turf occupied whatever space remained. In a dry Western climate, there is not much reason that arrangement has to remain the default.
Colorado’s own xeriscape history points in another direction. Denver Water coined the term “xeriscape” in 1981, combining xeros, the Greek word for dry, with landscape. The original concept wasn’t about eliminating vegetation. Its seven principles included planning, soil improvement, efficient irrigation, mulch, grouping plants by water needs, appropriate turf and maintenance. The lawn could stay. It simply had to earn its square footage.
That is still a useful rule. Keep the grass where somebody throws a ball, stretches out with a book, plays with the dog or needs an open surface. The thin strip along the side of the driveway that nobody uses is another matter. So is the strange triangle behind the mailbox that requires three turns with the mower and its own sprinkler head.
A Yard Should Have Some Weight to It
Plants move. They grow, disappear for winter, get cut back, bloom for three weeks and occasionally die for reasons nobody can quite explain. Stone does the opposite. It gives a landscape permanence.
Landscape architect Larry Cavender has described that effect well: “Well-placed boulders create interest and strength that no other material can match.” It is the word strength that seems particularly right. A large stone at a bend in a path or at the bottom of a slope can make everything around it feel more intentional. Perennials become softer beside it. Ornamental grasses look more delicate. A young tree doesn’t have to carry the composition while it spends the next decade becoming a tree.
This is also one of those cases where bigger is frequently better. A boulder can look enormous when it is sitting on a pallet at the stone yard and strangely timid once it is placed against a house, surrounded by shrubs and viewed from 50 feet away. Plants are going to get larger too. The rock will not.
Please Bury the Boulders
There is a particular landscaping look that could be described as “the boulder arrived Tuesday.”
You know it when you see it. A large stone is sitting perfectly upright on top of freshly graded soil, entirely exposed from top to bottom, with a ring of mulch carefully circling its base. Nothing about it suggests that geology had anything to do with how it got there.
The City of Mesa’s landscape-design guidance recommends burying at least a third of a boulder and planting close to it to soften the transition. Landscape contractor Terry Newman puts the aesthetic problem another way: you don’t want the rock to look like “something that fell from outer space.”
The exact fraction is less important than the illusion. Tilt it slightly. Turn its best face toward the place where people will see it. Let the grade come up around part of it. Give a shrub or grass permission to overlap one edge. The goal is to make people wonder if the house was built around the rock, even when everybody involved knows it arrived on a flatbed last week.
Go to the Stone Yard
Online shopping has made us dangerously confident about choosing natural materials from photographs.
A manufactured paver is supposed to look like the sample. Natural stone is under no such obligation. One piece can be warmer, another cooler. A flagstone pallet may contain rust, gray, buff and plum tones that barely show up in a thumbnail. A boulder has a front, a back, a top, a shape, a scale and sometimes one spectacular face that makes the whole thing worth choosing.
The Rock Garden, a Northern Colorado landscape stone supplier, makes a point of encouraging people to walk its Fort Collins yard rather than choosing everything remotely: “There’s no better way to choose stone than to see it up close.” Most of its stone begins only eight miles away at Willownook Quarry near Laporte, where material is extracted and processed into landscaping stone, veneer and custom-cut pieces.
This is one of the places where a stone supplier has an advantage over a Pinterest board. You can stand next to a two-ton boulder and realize that it isn’t actually too big. You can put two pieces of flagstone beside each other and see that the colors you assumed would match don’t. You may go in looking for gray and come out wanting something with considerably more rust in it.
Natural material is allowed to change your mind.
Don’t Match Everything
If the house has tan stone veneer, there is a strong temptation to find tan flagstone, tan wall stone, tan gravel and tan boulders so everything “goes together.”
It can go together a little too well.
Natural landscapes do not usually organize themselves around a single swatch. A better approach is to let materials have a relationship without requiring them to be identical. One stone might repeat a warm color from the house. Another could be substantially darker. The same material might appear once as large flagstone and again as walling stone, which creates continuity without making the whole property feel as if it came in a kit.
Stone supplier yards are useful precisely because they let you make those comparisons at full scale. The Rock Garden’s inventory includes flagstone, wall rock, boulders, slabs, steps, veneer and custom-cut material, with stone coming from its Laporte quarry as well as other regional sources. A good designer can use that variation the way an interior designer uses wood, metal and fabric: related enough to belong together, different enough to keep the room interesting.
The yard is a room too. It just has worse temperature control.
Rock and Plants Look Better Together
This is the part of xeriscaping that gets lost when “low water” gets translated into “remove plants.”
A large sweep of gravel can certainly use less irrigation than turf, but it also absorbs heat, has very little seasonal interest and does almost nothing for the softness that makes a landscape inviting. CSU’s guidance warns specifically against turning water-wise landscaping into rocked-over space because of the heat it creates and the vegetation it removes.
Stone becomes much more convincing when something is growing next to it. A boulder surrounded by blue grama, penstemon, rabbitbrush or ornamental grass reads differently than the same boulder sitting alone in gravel. Flagstone with thyme working into an occasional joint ages differently than a perfectly sterile patio. A retaining wall is usually improved once plants begin spilling slightly over its top.
Landscape architect Howard Cohen describes stone as a way to “break up” the softness of planted material. The reverse is equally useful. Plants break up the hardness of stone.
Neither has to carry the yard alone.
If the Property Slopes, Use the Slope
There is an enormous amount of landscaping money spent making interesting properties flatter.
Some grading is unavoidable. You need sensible drainage, stable surfaces and somewhere relatively level to put a table. But a slope can also give a landscape the thing that flat suburban lots frequently lack: a reason for something to happen.
A retaining wall can create a planting terrace. Large stone steps can make a grade change feel deliberate rather than inconvenient. Boulders can stabilize and visually anchor a slope. A dry creek can follow an existing low point while providing somewhere for stormwater to move. Cavender’s use of natural boulders for grade changes is one reason he values local stone yards and quarries; the material can do structural work while still looking like part of the landscape.
A perfectly flat rectangle gives a designer very little to react to. A difficult slope already has an opinion.
Sometimes it is better to listen to it.
Water Features Don’t Have to Become Backyard Theme Parks
There is a moment in the evolution of some water features where the designer loses confidence and starts adding rocks.
Then another rock. Then a bridge. Then a small waterfall. Then a second waterfall because the first one apparently needed context.
A single good stone with water moving over it can be more convincing.
The Rock Garden core-drills natural boulders for water features, which is one of the simplest examples of allowing the material itself to do most of the visual work. The shape is irregular because it is supposed to be irregular. Water catches on different parts of the surface. Moss or staining may eventually appear. The feature changes a little as it ages.
Placement matters more than ornament. Put it where the sound reaches a patio or an open window. Let plants edge toward it. Set it into the grade rather than balancing it conspicuously in the middle of a bed.
The best compliment for a naturalistic water feature may be that nobody immediately wonders where you bought it.
Leave Enough Empty Space for the Garden to Grow Into It
A landscape installation is one of the few expensive projects that can look slightly worse on the day it is finished than it will five years later.
The shrubs are small. The ornamental grasses are behaving themselves. Trees have an almost comical amount of mulch around very narrow trunks. Everything is separated by exactly the distances specified on the planting plan.
Give it time.
There is a temptation to compensate by buying larger plants or filling every opening, but mature size matters. What feels empty in the first year can feel beautifully balanced in the fourth and badly overcrowded in the seventh. Stone helps with that awkward beginning because it provides scale immediately. A wall, path or substantial boulder has presence while the plants around it are still deciding what they want to become.
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Eventually the grasses lean against the rock. Groundcover sneaks between pieces of flagstone. The edges become less perfect. The stone develops a little weathering, and the yard begins to lose the unmistakable look of having been installed.
That is usually an improvement.
Maybe “Nature Is the New Luxury” Is the Better Rule
Gorder’s rejection of the big green lawn is easy to interpret as an argument about water. In Colorado, water certainly belongs in the conversation. But her other line, “Nature is the new luxury,” is more interesting because it changes the goal.
Luxury in a landscape does not necessarily mean more hardscape, a larger patio or increasingly complicated outdoor amenities. It might mean material that came out of the ground eight miles away. A stone big enough to remain interesting after everything grows around it. Native plants moving in the wind. Shade in the right place. A patch of grass exactly large enough to be useful. A yard with enough birds, bees and seasonal change that October doesn’t look like July.
That version of landscaping is not anti-lawn, and despite all this talk about boulders, it isn’t pro-rock either. It is pro-place.
A Colorado yard should not have to pretend it lives somewhere wetter. It also does not have to become a field of gravel to prove that it understands drought. The more interesting possibility sits somewhere between those extremes: stone and plants, hard and soft, useful spaces and slightly wild ones, arranged with enough restraint that the landscape still feels connected to the place it came from.
Gorder may be right. The big green yard probably is outdated. What replaces it could be considerably better.
