Trees, hedges, native grasses and shrubs: the kinds of plant you'd probably consider "weeds" in US suburbia. Within cities, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraced_house, and there are villages in amongst the fields and forests of rural areas.
Even in Belgium, one of the highest density countries in the EU, most existing and newly built houses are semi-detached, with about twice as much semi-detached + detached houses as there are terraced houses.
In France, terraced homes are rather uncommon outside the North close to Belgium, and old city centers. In fact, I don't even know if we have a name for detached houses, as far as I know they're just called "a house" while a terraced house is a "city house".
So I don't have the numbers for all of the EU but I don't think most homes are actually terraced homes in the EU.
And people do have grass lawns, but only where grass actually grows without too much care needed. Where I come from on the coast grass doesn't grow well on the sandy ground and lawns are uncommon, but a few kilometres inland if you don't do anything you get a mostly-grass lawn, with a lot of clover, daisies and often orchids growing in it.
> It still makes sense to have a well because it is a waste to water the lawn with drinking water.
Watering the lawn is just a waste of water, period. Ground water is commonly used as the primary source of drinking water, so even if the water is being extracted from a well, it is pretty much drinking water.
This very much depends on the place. There are plenty of areas of Europe where groundwater at ordinary well depth is no longer potable and the community relies on a reservoir with a different source. So, if your property has an old well, all it is good for is watering a lawn or orchard, washing your car or bicycle, etc.
I’m curious: if the water isn’t considered potable, would you want to be watering plants with it? Is the contamination more often bacterial than chemical?
People all over the world water plants with water that is not potable itself due to bacterial or viral contamination. This is where the old traveler’s adage “Boil it, cook it, peel it, or forget it” comes from.
If the groundwater is not potable because of e.g. arsenic or pesticide contamination, I think that homeowners are usually aware of that and therefore are more likely to use the water only for washing purposes.
Right, I could have stated more explicitly. Watering possibly edible plants with pathogen polluted water seems okay. Watering them with chemically polluted water seems like maybe a way to ingest toxic stuff. Washing dishes seems dicey too.
Yeah that seems reasonable enough to me. I’ve seen parks and green spaces in Southern California that have warning signs about not drinking irrigation water.
My earlier comment was motivated by a concern that tapping a non-potable water source for one’s own family might bear health risks without more analysis of the state of that water. For all you know, even if you only use that water for plants, maybe you’re growing food with water high in arsenic and it’s accumulating in the food.
Lawns reduce the air and ground temperature significantly. Even if you have a shortage of water in your area, finding a way to maintain a natural lawn has benefits. That isn’t the same as maintaining a golf course, but watering a lawn to keep it from dying for a few peak-heat weeks is well worth it, in my opinion.
This is the next environmental movement i'd love to see, the end of lawns and acceptance of native landscapes all over the world, but especially the western world.
It is not as common to water one’s lawn in Poland. It’s not like the country doesn’t get enough rain, and most villagers don’t feel the need to show off perfect lawns to their neighbors as e.g. in the USA.
Don’t water the lawn (or fertilise or roundup etc.) in Australia: for some reason it stays green without it: buffalo grass is as tough as nails! Sometimes it goes yellow but it always comes back!
Lawns in the US consume as many resources as they do because the typical lawn you see isn't a species native to the US, instead it was imported from Europe. With the soil being different etc., it is not surprising lawns, especially when they're as big as in the US, require so many resources.
I went with a native grass and my watering is down to 1/4 what it was before that. the grass does go dormant and turn brown in the summer/colder winters though, so it's not as pretty but it is what it is, and HOA allows "xeroscaping"
imho that is the only sane way. The water consumption for keeping a lawn green in during the now all so common heatwaves is absurd and really not worth it considering the lawn will be fine once it starts raining again
Many lawns in the US do use grass native to that part of the US. Not all, but many. However grass goes dormant when it doesn't rain for a couple weeks and people don't like that brown look so they water even though the grass (either native or imported) doesn't need it. Likewise people don't like flowers and other weeds and so they apply a lot of chemicals to the lawn - but the grass doesn't need them.
TL;DR: lawns in the US do not need any resources. It is "perfect lawns" that need a lot of resources.
