For too long the lawn care and pest control industries have normalized meaningless, divisive terms like “overgrown.” We need to take the language back.

If you have a turfgrass lawn on most of your property, your yard is not pristine. It is undergrown.

If you or your lawn service company apply herbicides, insecticides, or synthetic fertilizers, your yard is not immaculate. It is contaminated.

If you regularly mow down whatever strip of land you may have under your purview, you might think you’re keeping up with your human neighbors. But you’re killing your wild neighbors.

Industry portrayals of what constitutes “normalcy” have infected our culture for so many decades that they’ve become the unquestioned default. The perfunctory use of terms like “overgrown,” “messy,” “damage,” “pest,” “nuisance,” “weed,” and “aggressive” is so ubiquitous that I’ve spent the past dozen years dismantling this outdated vernacular in my presentations and conversations with reporters. Our tendency toward binary thinking has long divided the natural world into false dichotomies like “pest” vs. “beneficial,” a construct that immediately sets up any insect not deemed worthy in agricultural settings as suspect at best.

Those same black-and-white divisions make their way into the journalistic lexicon, where they’re often stated as fact, without reflection or exploration. When my sister Janet Crouch’s successful battle to save her vibrant wildlife garden from an overreaching HOA was featured in the New York Times, I was surprised to open my daily Times email digest to this biased synopsis of the piece: “A couple wanting to keep their yard overgrown ended up changing state law.”

That was clearly the word choice of the email writer, who had not seen the Crouches’ garden. Nowhere in the original, thoughtful article by Times reporter Cara Buckley did Janet or her husband, Jeff, say they were nurturing an “overgrown” yard. Buckley herself described the garden as a thriving, beloved sanctuary filled with butterflies and birds. As she noted in her narrative, only a single complaining neighbor had used the negative, vague term in his arguments for smothering the whole community in turfgrass.

As a former newspaper journalist myself, I thought the writer of the Times newsletter, German Lopez, might appreciate a sincere note about the mischaracterization, so I emailed him the following message:

Hi German,

Thank you for your work on The Morning newsletter; I always appreciate seeing the snappy synopsis of the news when I get up each day.

Last week, in a link to the article on Janet and Jeff Crouch by Cara Buckley, “They Fought the Lawn,” you described the Crouches as having decided to “keep their yard overgrown.” I’m writing with the hope that you will consider using different language if you ever need to describe such a story or situation again. The word “overgrown” is perpetuated and recycled repeatedly to try to besmirch any kind of landscape that isn’t mowed turfgrass. It unfairly normalizes turf and makes ecological gardens seem like aberrations when in fact they’re completely natural (not to mention ever growing in popularity).

The word has long been a pet peeve of mine because it is steeped in cultural, manmade biases. And though I have a personal interest in this story (Janet and Jeff are my sister and brother-in-law), natural landscaping is also my profession. My sister’s garden is filled with life and much more sustainable than the surrounding yards. If you’re interested, you can see more photos in these articles: Butterflies: 1, Bullies: 0 and Busting the Property Values Myth.

Thanks for reading, and thanks again for your work!

Though I never received a reply, I hoped that Mr. Lopez would take more care with his language in the future. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be long before another reporter went on negative autopilot when describing wildlife-friendly gardens, this time in White Plains, New York. In an otherwise fine piece titled, “Neighbors Fight Over No Mow May: ‘What in the World Is Happening in This Place?’ ” the Wall Street Journal’s James Hagerty described the bees buzzing in the “mosaic of aster, native roses, blueberries, milkweed and monarda” in LeighAnn Ferrara’s suburban eco-landscape. Not leaving well enough alone, he went on to refer to Ferrara’s garden—shown in photos as a lovely place of winding paths through flower beds and trees—as an “unruly plot.”

If something is “unruly,” there must be a ruler to defy; in this case, the implication was that the gardener ruled supreme, and all of her fellow inhabitants were merely hers to subjugate. As with so many words ingrained in lawn-obsessed culture, “unruly” has frequently been invoked as a way to denigrate and punish women, children, and enslaved and disempowered people; a Dictionary.com definition—“disorderly and disruptive and not amenable to discipline or control”—gives this example: “Kate tried to control her unruly emotions.” Webster’s talks about “unruly children” and “a mane of unruly hair,” while the Cambridge Dictionary mentions “an unruly class of adolescents” and “an unruly mop of black hair.”

Terms most often used to describe crew-cut, pesticide-drenched lawns, on the other hand, have a historically classist connotation that our society associates positively with the clean fingernails of someone who doesn’t making a living by sinking her hands into the soil. Dictionary.com offers this example of the use of “manicured”: “a peaceful neighborhood with tidy, well-kept houses and manicured front lawns”—an implied tranquility that belies the deafening machinery deployed to maintain the standard lawn aesthetic.

Cambridge tells us that “if something, such as a garden, is manicured, it is well cared for …” To which we might respond: What, exactly, is being cared for in this vision of sanitized suburbia? Certainly not the many bees and butterflies who require abundant native flowers and dead wood and leftover stalks and fallen leaves and bare patches of soil for livelihoods. Not the squirrels and chipmunks who need the nuts and roots and branches of trees for their groceries and nurseries. And not the dwindling bird populations who are searching for seeds, berries, insects, nectar and nesting sites that are no longer there.

My yard isn’t overgrown, and neither is yours. In fact, if you’re like most Americans, I’d venture to say that it’s more likely undergrown. There are probably not enough trees, not enough shrubs, not enough wildflowers, not enough seedheads, not enough fallen leaves and logs, and not enough undisturbed soil to absorb rainwater and filter pollutants and provide shade in the summer and wind breaks in the winter, let alone to support your wild neighbors. And there are probably more than enough mowers, blowers, chainsaws, and other power tools in your community to endanger any turtle, frog, squirrel or baby rabbit who just happens to be in the line of mow-at-all-costs rapid-fire destruction committed in the name of pampering a barren expanse of turf.

After New York Times columnist Margaret Roach wrote a piece about my book Wildscape last spring, one commenter chastised me for “placing the well-being of insects, say, above her own enjoyment of playing croquet on her lawn.” He wasn’t just stating the obvious; he was making an arrogant and almost comical assumption about what other people value. For me, choosing to appreciate dragonflies and fireflies over tapping a ball around isn’t a hard choice at all. Croquet, golf, or anything else that involves standing still in scraped land represents to me not only the height of boredom but the absence of everything that makes life beautiful: birdsong, insect song, flowers buzzing with bees and butterflies, trees swaying in the breeze, frogs and rabbits hopping at my feet. I don’t mind if other people enjoy lawn-sport activities—to each his own—but I do mind the massive scale of their encroachment on our fellow animals’ ability to survive and thrive. The all-or-nothing, uncompromising approach that dominates the American worldview is a monoculture all its own, an emotional and intellectual poverty that plays no small part in widespread habitat destruction.

Toward a New Vocabulary

We need a new framework for dissolving extremist labels that burden not only plants and animals but also our ability to truly see and understand them. By preying upon people’s fears and conjuring new ones, the lawn care and pest control industries have shaped how we think and talk. These are just a few of the terms I’d like to see excised from the common parlance of gardening and landscaping:

“Pest/nuisance” (and their reductive counterpart, “beneficial”):

The word “nuisance” is baked into a booming industry of “nuisance wildlife control operators,” most of whom rely on blind acceptance of their characterizations of mammals, snakes, and even many birds as inherent nuisances. This disrespect leads to draconian measures—including drowning, poisoning, and cruel forms of trapping—for “getting rid” of animals who are just trying to live their lives in increasingly human-dominated environments. “Pest” is most commonly invoked by gardeners who perennially seek to divide the world around them into “good” or “bad.” While researching my first book a decade ago, I asked entomologists about the origins of its supposed antithesis: the unfortunate phrase “beneficial insect.” It was simply a marketing term, they conceded, designed to encourage people “to like at least some insects.” Understandable, I suppose, but a laudatory adjective for one group of organisms automatically casts aspersions on all the rest. Under the “pest vs. beneficial” framework, animals are considered “guilty” and worthless until proven otherwise.

“Weed”:

This word is so pervasively misused that the only solution I’ve been able to come up with is to try not to use it all. In the wildlife gardening and landscaping movement, we have enough trouble helping people learn about plants without throwing toxic terms into the mix. As I detailed in The Humane Gardener, I initially assumed that many plants volunteering in my yard—such as common milkweed and jewelweed—needed to be removed, partly because of their unfortunate common names but also because mainstream sources declared them noxious. It wasn’t long before my eyes were opened, and since then I’ve taken care to put special emphasis on maligned plants that nurture wildlife and show up here all on their own: violets, goldenrods, sumacs, black cherries, milkweeds, bonesets, broomsedge, nimblewill, and many more.

“Aggressive”:

What right does our species—with all its bulldozers, tractor mowers, guns, poisons, and traps—have to label anyone, plant or animal, “aggressive” or to describe them as “pursuing one’s aims forcefully” (the Dictionary.com definition of the term)? If the otherwise peaceful, flower-visiting, insect-gathering bald-faced hornet is “aggressive” toward a human, it’s out of necessity; she needs to defend her family when predators get too close to her nest. If the black rat snake is coiled up and jutting her head at a beloved pet dog, that snake is not aggressive; she is scared. If mountain mints or ragworts like where they live and start spreading, we might do better to call them “vigorous”; we should rejoice instead of recoil, expressing gratitude for their help in healing the land.

“Messy/overgrown”:

“Messy” according to whom? And what does it mean to be grown, let alone overgrown? Given the mess we’ve made of the planet, how can we possibly tell the American bumblebee mother, who prefers to nest in toppled grasses left from one season to the next, that her perfect spot for reproduction doesn’t fit our arbitrary aesthetic standards? The guise of neatness is an astounding form of hubris, taking away the fallen leaves where silvery checkerspot caterpillars overwinter and toads emerge in spring and northern flickers forage all year long. “Messy” is not these animals or their habitats. “Messy” is the eroded, muddy, polluted streams in our watersheds, contaminated by the fertilizers and pesticides used to maintain tens of millions of acres of turfgrass across the continent. Messy are the resulting dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Messy are the roadsides filled with invasive plants and trash thrown out of car windows and the drained, dried-up ghosts of wetlands where frogs and salamanders can no longer find places to breed.

“Damage”:

There’s a small but growing acceptance of plant-munching by caterpillars who will turn into butterflies and moths and provide nourishment for birds. But even the native plant movement has been slow to accept the plant-eating, nest-building habits of our closest kin among our wild neighbors: the mammals. Rabbits, groundhogs, and deer are routinely called out as near-criminals for eating native species, even though they, too, have evolved with these plants for millennia. Squirrels, chipmunks, voles, moles, and armadillos are trapped and poisoned for digging holes to forage and nest, yet humans leave much larger scars on the land to build our own houses and plant our own crops. And we too often forget how animal activities collectively nurture the ecosystem by planting seeds, tilling soil, spreading mycorrhizal fungi, controlling plant-eating insects and creating nutrient-rich substrates for more plants to spread. Humans do far more “damage” to the lands around them, and the least we can offer our wild friends in return is a chance to help us repair it.

“Undeveloped/unimproved/vacant lot”:

The 9-acre woodland two lots down from me is an “undeveloped parcel” to the real estate agent trying to sell it. The parklands in my county that lack trails and toilets and ball fields are called “unimproved.” As far as I can tell, these places are fully developed by nature already. And the only improvements needed are those that could be provided by animals like beavers, whose ecosystem engineering would repair the wounds left in the land when people filled in the marshes, cut down trees by the streams, and created erosion problems that send runoff directly into waterways. Likewise, lands advertised as “vacant lots” and squeezed between commercial centers of our communities aren’t vacant at all; they are last refuges of growing, breeding and feeding grounds for milkweed and goldenrod and monarch butterflies and migratory birds who need habitat wherever they can find it.

“Specimen”/”ornamental”:

I grew up hearing words like these every night at the dinner table, where my dad told stories of his workday as the head of the florist and nursery crops lab at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. My aversion to “ornamental” hadn’t registered yet back then, but in my adult life I find it reductive, casting plants as existing for own pleasure and our own use. And its companion, “specimen,” fills me with loneliness—I feel lonely for the tree treated like a single organism instead of a connected being sharing space and nutrients and sun and shade and all the stuff of life with her many neighbors above and below ground. None of us are single bodies, least of all trees; we are collections of countless organisms. In my garden I might admire the branching of a smoke tree or the deep color of a chokeberry, but I know they don’t carry these traits alone—that the parts of a whole aren’t divisible the way our language implies, that they are ever-shaped by the winds and waters and all the other life in their midst.

A dynamic landscape that changes with the seasons isn’t overgrown; it’s simply grown in, striving to reach its full potential. But our cultural mindset toward our wild neighbors is undergrown, stunted into perpetual stagnation. We would do well to retrain our brains, focusing on nurturing our empathy and senses to leave more space for the rest of the living world to grow in peace, instead of being chopped to pieces under the heavy weight of our biases and the sorrow of our collective turning away.