A green, lush, well-maintained lawn has become an icon as representative of suburban America as baseball, hot dogs and apple pie. To me, even today, the sound of a lawn mower or the smell of freshly cut grass evokes fond childhood memories of summer twilights spent playing tag on the front lawn.

Since the 1930s, when lawns became commonplace in middle-class America, Americans have taken them for granted as part of our landscape. The well-manicured front lawn has come to symbolize good citizenship to our neighbors, as well as to represent our ability to control nature, says Virginia Scott Jenkins in "The Lawn: A History of An American Obsession."

But the beauty of lawns comes at a steep price. We pay in time, money and labor spent on lawn care. In 1999, North Carolinians spent $1.22 billion annually to maintain 2.14 million acres of turf, according to an estimate from the North Carolina Turfgrass Survey. More importantly, we pay in the depletion of increasingly limited water resources and degradation of water quality.

As recent news stories have pointed out, water usage in the Triangle typically doubles in the summer, and most of that increased usage is due to watering of lawns. Most of the local water authorities are already implementing restrictions.

In coming decades, water will become increasingly precious in North Carolina as the population increases dramatically. At the same time, global warming experts are predicting a hotter and drier climate in the Southeastern United States, with a more unpredictable water supply.

In this environment, it is time to think about shrinking the areas we devote to lawn.

LAWNS NOT ONLY SOAK UP WATER THAT COULD BE PUT TO BETTER USE, they also are major contributors to the degradation of our water systems. In order to grow a lawn the neighbors will envy, homeowners regularly apply fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. The chemicals tend to run off during heavy rains into the groundwater, streams and lakes we depend on for drinking water. Excess nitrogen in waterways also harms aquatic life.

Why do our lawns require so much water and chemicals? One reason is that lawns are particularly ill-suited to the Southern climate. Turfgrasses, which are not native to the United States, are not well-adapted to the extremes of heat, periods of drought and poor clay soils that are typical in our area. Fescue, a common cool-season grass, "grows here because we've got it on life support," says Pete Schubert, a project engineer with the EPA in Research Triangle Park.

A second reason lawns are so high-maintenance is because as lawn technology improved over time, the standards for a good lawn rose. Now, a lawn is supposed to be green year-round, and uniform in appearance, with no brown spots or weeds. To maintain this artificial ideal, intensive applications of fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides are required.

When I step back to think about the time and resources Americans put into their lawns -- many of which are strictly ornamental -- the whole enterprise begins to seem a bit silly. As landscape designer Darrell Morrison put it, "There's something wrong with paying to make something grow, then using energy to cut it short."

ALTERNATIVES TO LAWNS DO EXIST. One increasingly popular approach is xeriscaping, meaning dry landscaping.

Xeriscaping makes use of native plants that don't require irrigation and limits lawn areas to those that are used regularly for outdoor recreation. A typical xeriscaped yard is based on zones: one that requires no supplemental water, one that features plants that occasionally need water and one that requires moderate water (such as a small lawn). There is a wealth of information on the Internet about xeriscaping and landscaping with native plants.

Learning not to crave the elusive ideal of the perfect lawn requires a shift in aesthetics as well as values. Although lawns will always hold a nostalgic value for me, I have moved on. In a time of climate change and increasing water scarcity I see beauty and good citizenship in conserving our natural resources, rather than in attempting to maintain an artificially green carpet in the front yard.

(Sheila Read is a free-lance writer, gardener and volunteer at the N.C. Botanical Garden. More information on xeriscaping is at www.ncsu.edu/ncsu/CIL/WRRI/uwc/xeriscape.pdf, and more on native plants is at http://ncbg.unc.edu/plants-and-gardening/.)