With the arrival of autumn comes advice about looking after lawns, with turf devotees detailing how – with the correct pH, fertilising regime and mowing heights – you might keep your grass green through the cooler months.
It's all very well for deciduous trees to come out firing autumnal colour but we've never embraced yellowing kikuyu, browning couch, or buffalo that has taken on a purple tinge.
Lawns are the one area of our gardens that have failed to radiate the allure of the seasonal. Ever since lawns gained favour – possibly as early as the 16th century and certainly by the start of the 18th century – the whole point has been to keep them looking like a short-pile carpet. Before the lawnmower was invented in 1830, the trimming fell to livestock or scythes. Regular cutting stimulates thick, resilient growth but it also eliminates flowers and seed heads, the keys to reproduction; American writer Elizabeth Kolbert once described mowing as the means by which we keep turf grass in a "perpetual state of vegetable adolescence".
Left to its own devices, the Pennisetum clandestinum (kikuyu, which is native to East Africa) that blankets our parks, verges and backyards reaches 40 centimetres and – come autumn and spring – sports shy flowers almost entirely enclosed by the leaf sheath. Stenotraphrum secundatum (buffalo grass, also native to tropical Africa) and Cynodon dactylon (couch grass) have 30-centimetre leaves through summer.
Left to grow, these tough, vigorous, warm-season grasses will crowd into spots where they are not wanted and become patchy in others. They will also lose their colour without watering and feeding.
They will never look as good as the tall, tufted Phalaris that my mower hasn't been able to reach in my one-time paddocks. Now tangled in fences, it has been a surprise highlight for months. This stock-grazing grass (which tends to go dormant in summer) is straw-gold, more than a metre high and with long cylindrical flower heads.
But it's also a weed and there are much better options for lawn alternatives. The Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne is currently sporting great expanses of Poa labillardieri, a dense blue-green tussock grass endemic to much of Victoria that features weeping, beige late-summer foliage. Like most native grasses it grows in clumps and doesn't have rhizomes or stolons to "run".
If you are wanting more of a classic lawn look, Microlaena stipoides (weeping grass) – also indigenous in much of Victoria – retains green leaves year-round and tolerates light traffic. Left alone, it provides seed and habitat for native birds, but it can also be mown.
Other native grasses commonly recommended for lawn substitutes include Chloris truncata (windmill grass) with light green foliage, Themeda australis (kangaroo grass,) with orange-brown flower heads in summer, and Austrodanthonia species (wallaby grasses) that tolerate drought but won't necessarily stay green.
Alternatively you can get a succulent lawn look with the native Disphyma crassifolium (rounded noon-flower, which doesn't tolerate being walked over) and a clumpy, bumpy one from the Asian Zoysia tenuifolia.
And you don't have to stick to grass. French nurseryman Olivier Filippi, who has long decried the high-maintenance demands and often disappointing results of conventional lawn, has been researching alternatives to this "dreary uniformity" for more than 20 years. His 2011 book Planting Design for Dry Gardens, detailing all the dry-climate ground covers (think euphorbias, artemisias, nepeta, phlomis) that gardeners might deploy instead, was published in English last year.
"Consider how much lawn is absolutely necessary in your garden and eliminate it from places where its presence can't really be justified," he writes. "Why should a 21st-century gardener living in a dry climate be obliged to follow a landscape aesthetic developed in England in the 18th century?"
It's about layering instead of flattening, mixing rather than matching and appreciating the nuances of yellow, silver, burgundy and even brown. Give it a try this autumn.