Top Benefits of a well-maintained, healthy lawn and landscape
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Helps beautify the neighborhood.
- Creates a relaxing space of natural beauty. Grassy areas quickly affect people's moods by creating feelings of serenity, privacy, thoughtfulness or happiness. Its yearly cycles of growth and color changes, lifts the human spirit and links urban dwellers with their countryside heritage.
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Front lawns of just eight average houses have the same cooling effect as about 70 tons of air conditioning, while the average home-size central air unit has only a 3-4 ton capacity.
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While strict conservationists berate the lowly lawn as an expensive consumer of natural resources, it is actually a natural provider for our ecosystem. Healthy, dense lawns absorb rainfall six times more effectively than a wheat field, four times better than a hay field, and prevents runoff and erosion of our precious top soil. A healthy lawn also traps much of the estimated 12 million tons of dust and dirt released into the US atmosphere annually.
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Lawns purify water entering into underground aquifers. The lawns root mass and supporting soil microbes act as massive filters to capture and breakdown many types of pollutants common to our urban environment.
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A healthy, vibrant lawn also increases the real estate market value of a home and its salability. A Gallup Survey
reported 62% of all US homeowners felt investment in lawns and landscaping
were as good or better than other home improvements. The investment
recovery rate is actually 100-200% for landscape improvement, compared to
a deck or patio that will recover only 40-70% of the installation cost. Proper
and well maintained landscaping adds 15% to a home's value according
to buyers. -
Recovery rates among hospitalized patients are often quicker when their rooms view a landscaped area compared to patients with non-landscaped views.
- Athletic playing fields covered with dense turf have proven to be safer for the athletes as demonstrated by a simple egg drop test. When a dozen raw eggs were dropped from a height of 11 feet onto a two-inch thick piece of dense turf, none broke; two thirds of the dropped eggs broke on thin turf from that height, and from just 18 inches, all the eggs broke on an all-weather track!
