I agree. The resistance is perplexing and frustrating. You might enjoy this link. It delves into the idea of "lawn" pretty deeply.

Here is a link that might be useful: Turf War

So now that you have vented and lost the first battle, regroup and plan your next battle. Be patient and persistent.

There are ways to overcome objections.
The insidious addition of a few natives each year, replacing exotics, will be unnoticed by observers.
After a few years, your landscape will be populated mostly by native plants and the average busybody won't even know the difference!
My experience.
Rb

pseudacris,

I read that article and loved it, especially the quote:

In his anti-lawn essay "Why Mow?," Michael Pollan puts it this way: "Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much." haha!

I have in my acre backyard, amongst the native cottage, vegetable, and woodland gardens, a play area that would best be described as a Freedom Lawn. It consists of buffalo grass, violets, dandelions (which were actually cultivated in my area for dandelion greens and wine; we have a Dandelion Festival every year), clover, wild onions and other "weeds" that never have to watered or fertilized or thatched or any of the meaningless toil that goes into the contemporary idea of lawns. We mow it every once in a while when it gets too high for the dogs and kids to play in. It's great and I highly recommend it.

I posted my above message on the Lawns forum, with a less than positive response. I thought, "no point in preaching to the choir, I should get out there and save some souls," you know?

We were suburbanites for years with one of the nicest lawns in the neighborhood. Now we own 8 acres in rural Ohio and love it. We are planting about 2 acres of native grasses and forbs this winter and we are so involved in reading books, looking on the web and talking to other prairie folks. Our friends look at us with disbelief when we talk about the prairie plans. I think that it is easier to plant a yard of turf grass than to do the research and plant a prairie; however, we have visited several prairies and there is nothing like it. Hopefully within about a year we will walk out our front and back doors and be in one.
Our beautiful golden retreiver died of cancer about a year ago and the oncologist that we worked with said that often it is the chemicals (remember we were suburbanites) on lawns that initiate cancers (it was on his nose). We now use no chemicals and really don't care that sod webworms were munching on the little bit of turf grass that we have. We have a new dog that should be healthier. I hope that when the prairie becomes established we will have some vindication with friends that can appreciate the hard work we have already put into this, not to mention the money and time.

Happy in Baltimore, OH.

Pife

I just came across an article in Sunset written as a rebuttal to complaints about natives. Honestly, there are a lot of people out there who are uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, and natives involve thinking outside of the box, or is that the big box store garden section?

Here is a link that might be useful: Sunset item in defense of natives

Even the big box in Austin Texas is giving the nod to some natives, but they still keep selling what works in Delaware. You can order buffalo grass sod from them. I feel like putting a gun to the pot of the forsythia and shooting it before it is planted on a a Central Texas caliche hillside. We have been approaching developers that are building subdivisions and recommending leaving as much of the native ground undisturbed and introducing native grasses and giving the new owners a recommended plant list and a copy of Sally Wasowski's Gardening with Native Plants. We also got him to undersize his roads.We have had .success with this one developer. Water is a huge issue in Texas. I just wish he hadn't planted that 5 acre leaky lake on the very top of the hill and filled it and drained the water table in this area. All the neighbors wells are dry. His straw is bigger and deeper. The deeds actually limit what they are allowed to put under lawn. One success at a time. Our success here was helped along by a huge legal success where we forced another absentee landowner to clean up a natural spring that his subdivision had totally fouled with over application of fertilizer and clearing of the native grasses so they could put down their suburban ireland look on an uplands above a glorious water hole and waterfall. We succeeded in him stopping his battle because he finally came down from Connecticut to see what all the hubub was about and meet the neighbors and found out why they would never stop fighting. He did change the planting of that subdivision also back to the native and cleaned up the water hole and removed their retention pond out of the recharge zone.
I have always had tall grass. The only time we whack it back is if we here about a grass fire somewhere nearby. It is all native bluestems, sedges, dropseed, indiangrass, etc. It was there before we built and I am too lazy to do anything about it. I do have a growing garden within the native framework and I am not a purist about everything having to be native but it has to live and survive and not become invasive in the native framework. Now if I could only get rid of the bermuda an KR bluestem in my front pasture, I would be happy as a clam.