People regularly complain about homeowners associations negatively interfering with their lawns. In fact, these issues are so frequent that there is a fairly popular (and NSFW-titled) Reddit page dedicated to chronicling them. It's less common for a town or city itself to directly involve itself with citizens' yards, but oftentimes, they can be just as damaging, if not even more so.

This was recently the case for an unlucky Redditor and their neighborhood, whose city tore up their plants in service of fixing a longstanding plumbing issue. After doing so, it further jeopardized the health of their front yard.

Posted on the r/lawncare subreddit, the OP shared two pictures of the "grass" the city planted after resolving the plumbing problem, likely as some sort of informal apology for months of sidewalk and street inconveniences. Clearly, though, this gift wasn't thought out well enough, because the grass not only looks quite strange, but it's almost certainly going to pose problems for the OP's neighborhood.

One intrepid Redditor confirmed by explaining that the plant is called Velvet Leaf and is extremely invasive.

"Either way you need to spray or pull those things before they go to [seed] or you'll be chasing them all around your yard and the neighborhood for the next decade," the user wrote.

In this kind of extreme scenario, perhaps the best course of action for a lawn is to completely start over by tearing it out and installing native plants before the invasives damage the surrounding ecosystem.

A natural lawn can save you significant money and time on maintenance, while also lowering your water bills. In addition, they also create a healthier ecosystem for pollinators, which ultimately benefits everyone, as pollinators protect our food supply. Even a partial lawn replacement with options like a native-plant garden or grass substitute such as clover can provide these same benefits.

Commenters were similarly baffled by the pictures.

One top-rated response simply read, "Lol wtf."

Another user was a bit more sympathetic and assumed the city made a mistake in its planting, writing, "That was definitely not intentional lol," though the grass is already making its impact known regardless.

In response to the post's title of "WTF did the city plant in our yards?" one response really took the cake, with a Redditor quipping that it was "State sponsored terrorism."

What's the hardest thing about taking care of your yard? Mowing the lawn 🏡 Controlling weeds 🌿 Keeping pests at bay 🐿️ I don't have a yard 🤷 Click your choice to see results and speak your mind.

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