The subject line pretty much says it all. We got rid of all the grass 4 or 5 years ago & have never looked back. Everything is beautiful now. All the time. Don't own a mower, weed eater, or edger anymore. Xeriscape to the max. No sprinkler system either. No pesticides, no fungicides.
Yet people stop & gasp with awe at our yard. Flowers everywhere. Groundcovers you can walk on & the dog can lay on.
I don't miss a lawn one tiny bit. Best thing we ever did. Now we get to enjoy the yard instead of just work on it.

i remember what grass used to look like!!!-then i started growing and breeding liliums,.,.all of a sudden there were hundreds of pots and white poly boxes where the lawn used to be,.,.

Lawn? I've got a few square feet of Buffalo Grass in one place...might not qualify as a lawn. Hmm...the Brits play games on those emerald green manicured expanses of lawn, don't they? Well, if I should ever lose my marbles and want to play lawn games, I might have to go get some Astroturf, because this area is virtually a desert now!

lost my marbles years ago,.,. - but i'll still just grow lilies

I have a six foot strip by the road to 'pretend' we still have grass but the rest of my yard is grass-free!

We converted our front yard from grass to Texas native plants, and it looks beautiful. We still have some grass in the back yard, we shall see how that goes.

Ann, what ground covers do you grow?

This is down at our house in zone 10 fl. & I may leave some things off but here goes:
Spathoglottis plicata, daylilys, liriope, mondo grass, neomarica longifolia (yellow walking iris), Stachytarpheta jamaiansis (NATIVE blue porterweed) Anthericum saundersiae (lily grass), Epidendrum fulgens (ground orchid), Parson's juniper, Tradescantia pallida (Purple heart), Russelia equisetiformis (firecracker plant), Zephyranthes (rain lily), Helianthus debilis (beach sunflower), Muhlygrass (which I will never plant again), other ornamental grasses, Dietes irioides, gazanias (which grow year round there), Aptenia cordifoila (baby sun rose), Bulbine frutescens, Cuphea hyssopifolia (mexican heather), Dietes bicolor, Euphorbia tithymaloides, Juniperus procumbens "nana", Pilea microphylla, Tulbaghia violancea.

Great diversity, Ann. I HATEHATEHATEHATE St. Augustine. Grass should be GREEN, soft, narrow-bladed, and fire-ant and prickly-sticker free!!!! ARGGG. But I'm from the north and it actually rains enough there to HAVE the soft green stuff...sigh... Do plan keep a small area of grass as I slowly eliminate what is there, at least in front, and replace with perennial and annual beds. Eventually want to try Buffalo or Zoysia grass instead. If I can get rid of the other nasty stuff, that is.

That's the hard part... getting rid of the other nasty stuff.
Here, where we bought property there is pasture grass & 5 ac. so there's little chance I can do away with it all. But I'm not going to water the pasture grass. It's gotta survive on it's own or it dies! Pasture grass survives. But my biggest plan is to turn most of the pasture (meadow) areas into wildflower meadows. A little at the time.
I will have less "garden" here. The property itself is it's own garden. Of course, around the house I will have my favorites but they will be chosen very carefully & judiciously.

Debra- I hate St. Augustine too- BLAH! It was one of my first huge complaints when we moved from East TN to Dallas- I just couldn't stand the grass.

I'm so excited for those of you who have no lawn!! You'll be getting tree-mails from me for the Garden Tour

Just woods here. Grass is a weed that gets ripped out by the roots when it shows up in our gravel driveway, lol!

I am working to replace all the lawn with plants native to Fl (which are also mostly TX natives Josephine). I am putting mulch everywhere else saving the same little strip near the road about 6' wide as Hetty has done. I love it!

I also have plenty of none natives growing around also, but I try to stay with drought tolerant plants. I also try to use very little fertilizer and only organic pest control.

I will soon have my FL license and will be officially a nursery here.

Heavily, staunchly Team No Friggin' Lawn! No way in heck!! NO NO NO. Grass requires too much work, too much water, cutting/weeding/trimming/reseeding and looks boring after you see yard after yard after yard of the same thing. BLEH. I'm 100% Team Roses. My property (I live on a city lot) is pie-shaped as I'm at the end of a cul-de-sac & so my front yard is quite small & narrow.. I think it's like 15' at the narrowest & .. 22? at the widest in the front yard. After trying to grow grass for 2 years, I said to heck w/it and ripped all the sod out - come to find out why I can't grow sod is because 1) I'd have to have the entire front yard tilled professionally as it's mostly clay for the first foot down & then sand under that, 2) the grass roots never ever got deeper than sod-thickness due to overwatering, but if you don't water, it croaks, 3) I have some kind of lawn fungus that's quite nasty & kills the grass quickly & 4) I also have grubs. So out it all went! In the front yard now is .. uh.. need to count.. uh...... I dunno. 75-90? roses? I'll have to make an accurate count one of these days. I put down about 6-10" of mulch on top of the weedblock fabric (the grey stuff from Costco) and that keeps the roses from (mostly) dying in the winter (I'm zone 5-4, and most of my roses are zone 6-7). The back yard is quite wide, about 177' wide, and about a 3rd of that is more roses (probably about.. oh.. er.. hmm.. 90? 120? roses and mulch, along with spirea, butterfly bushes, and tons & tons of bluebeards! I have a small section, about 60' wide and.. 22?' ft deep is my "dog area" where it's primarily weeds & sand.. nothing can grow there due to 2 pain-in-the-butt dogs digging, tearing things up, etc, and then another small section that's... 50?ft wide & .. 17?ft deep that's ... yup, you guessed it, more roses. Probably only about 30-40 roses in that small section. I'm hoping that next year (2012) everything will look more like roses rather than little spindlies everywhere.. then that'll be pictures worth looking at! But grass? No, that's for golf-courses and cemeteries.

@ Charlene: Congratulations!!

Good idea, Charlene! And wow, that's a lot of roses, Toni! Bet it'll be so pretty!

Definitely a Team No Lawn Member -

April 30, 2011 - that was the day that the last bit of lawn at my house was removed. All the grass was gone from the backyard 15 years ago when the swimming pool and basketball court was put in. Started my "Lawn no more" project on my front yard on April 2010 because I didn't see any value in a lawn - especially since I have no young kids that wants to run around on the grass anymore. If I am going to water something, it has to give back either food or beauty. And, I wanted to cut way back on the amount of landscape watering - and what is the point in growing something just to mow it back week after week? Since I was doing this one square foot at a time, I allotted myself three year to do this project. Once I got started, I decided to go full speed and got rid of all my lawn in 14 months. I divided up my front lawn area into three sections, and worked on one section at a time. I posted these photos recently on another thread, but since it fits so well in this theme, I am re-posting this series of photos from section 1 of my yard.

August 2009 - the way it was..............September 2010 - phase 1 is well on it's way...............September 2011 - not a speck of lawn here.

@ Diane!
Well done!

Wonderful! I tend to 'nibble' - when I weed on the edges of the remaining grass area, I tend to take a few inches here and there every time