Lawns have recently become a cultural battlefield, with one side wanting to do away with them completely in favor of native plants and the other side striving to protect them at all costs, punishing those who disobey. But one new lawnmower wants to split the difference.
For decades, uniformly green grass lawns have been the standard in the United States. However, there is a growing backlash against these lawns, stemming from an awareness that they harm the environment and surrounding ecosystems.
Grass lawns often require poisonous herbicides and pesticides to maintain, but they can also be expensive and time-consuming. That's why many people are rewilding their lawns, turning toward native plants that support a healthy ecosystem, including insects and wildlife.
However, there is a backlash against those native lawns as well — mainly from nosy neighbors and homeowners associations (HOAs), which seek to police what types of plants grow in their neighborhoods and strictly mandate that everyone has a traditional green grass lawn.
That's where the lawnmower of compromise comes into play.
Swedish company Husqvarna says that its new robotic lawnmower is programmed to intentionally leave 10% of your lawn unmowed. This, in theory, will attract bees, butterflies, and other pollinators, while also keeping the HOA off your back.
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Of course, whether a 90% mowed lawn will be enough for the infamously overzealous HOA remains to be seen.
The mower uses GPS to map your yard and create a "rewilding zone," which means that you don't have to tell it anything — the machine analyzes your yard for you and makes the decisions about where pollinators should hang out. Husqvarna's website describes the feature as "the first feature of its kind in the world."
Husqvarna's robotic mower is also battery-driven, an environmental upgrade over the gas-powered mowers of the past.
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