Speakers at the “How Native Landscaping is Healthier for People, the Environment and our Pocketbooks” forum urged suburbanites to cast away their lawn mowers and fertilizers and embrace a new life with native vegetation.

“Turf has an incredibly vicious cycle of need,” said landscape architect Jay Womack of Wight and Co., a firm that specializes in environmental work. “It’s a vicious, vicious cycle of maintenance.”

Instead of being a slave to a conventional lawn, conservationists advised adding prairie grasses, bushes and flowers.

Womack noted Illinois has 1,600 native plants. Although they’re easy to grow, they’re are often neglected by gardeners, he said.

Prairie species are “well-suited to summer drought because the roots are 20 to 30 feet deep,” Womack said. “They don’t need irrigation or pesticides. They’re able to intercept the rain.

“Because prairie plants are pollinated by insects, they don’t contribute to hay fever. Kentucky bluegrass contributes to hay fever,” he said, further shaming bluegrass by noting that it originates in Europe.