Mine would probably be banned, too, if I didn't live in a city that actually encourages planting native plants.

Suburban can define vastly different communities. It can be sprawling estates or still dense communities that are simply not-in-the-city. Williston Park is a solid, desirable middle class neighborhood with modest but very well maintained houses on mostly 40'x100' lots, meaning that your neighbor's wall can be just 12' away from yours... There is a broad spectrum of blue and white collar households. Good schools. Shops and restaurants. Many houses of worship. You can tell that everyone has great pride in this close knit community. I can see how the homeowner's unconventional landscaping would be a problem in this and other LI villages. As much as I love nature, I too would have a serious problem with a neighbor's "native" property. (eagerly await the backlash)

Hey, if you spend +/-850K on a house and put considerable time, money & effort to keep it neat and kept, you tend to take issue if the property next door looks abandoned. Call it social conditioning, peer pressure, unnatural or whatever you choose... It will affect the value of your single most valuable investment. If this sincere, well meaning person had a property with no neighbors for hundreds of feet or otherwise didn't impact others, I would applaud her efforts. However, in this context, it is difficult to be sympathetic.

that it is not Nature anymore.

Next year it will look much better because the bare ground will be covered and there will be more flowers. And what is "beautiful" to some - a short-mowed lawn that looks like a putting green, manicured shrubs, plants all in neat rows growing surrounded by brown mulch - might not be beautiful to someone else. It's definitely not beautiful to me; it's artificial and might as well be made of plastic. To me, a beautiful yard has a multitude of plants and flowers growing as nature intended, not in tidy rows; a year-round home for birds and pollinators, no useless and water-wasting turf grass (which might as well be made of plastic for all it gives back to the environment). I love my neighborhood - so many people have given over parts or all of their yards and boulevard spaces to native flowers and shrubs. And this time of year, with all the blooming coneflowers and black-eyed susans and sunflowers and liatris and solidago, and so many monarch butterflies visiting them, it's especially wonderful.

You wouldn't like it if you neighbors told you you had to dress a certain way, drive a certain kind of car, or cut your hair a certain way, would you ? That's why you don't give them that right. Expect them to reciprocate.

This business of it affecting others' property values -- something that "everyone knows" to be true -- deserves hard skepticism and a demand for quantitative evidence.

Our local city gov't is OWNED by the real estate industry -- a majority of board members are realtors or former realtors. They pass ordinances they believe, as dogma, keep property values high, at the cost of labor and expense to residents, including those who are not well enough, nor wealthy enough, to devote much attention to their lawns. When property values go up, property values go up; so we have a gov't which is requiring us to labor and sacrifice for some arbitrary standard of appearance which we do not necessarily share, and are rewarded for our coerced efforts by higher taxes.

If you want my lawn to look nice, you can help pay for the effort, or shut up.

The outdated European aesthetic of water hogging manicured lawns sprayed with chemicals that kills all insect and plant life while killing the soil life (that needs MORE chemicals and water) is what should be shunned.

Leaves don’t fall to the ground to give you chores to clean up—it’s nature’s 4 billion year design to protect its roots, retain soil moisture and provide habitat for wildlife. Layers of decaying plant matter as self-mulch is beautiful—just like a walk in the woods.

This isn’t leaving abandoned cars or trash on your property. This is actually the landscaping that fits the region.

We have lost 70% of our insect species due to poisoning and loss of habitat. Insects are a keystone species for the food chain, including baby birds. We need our pollinators and other bugs so the rule should be to provide habitat for them as the least we should be doing considering the massive urban sprawl and human encroachment that destroys so much in its wake.

And don’t get me started on leaf blowers!!!