Evelyn J. Hadden writes and speaks about low-maintenance, nature-friendly, soul-satisfying landscapes with less or no lawn. Based in Minnesota, she travels across the country visiting gardens and speaking to other gardeners.

Hadden founded the LessLawn website in 2001 to share what she learned while making her first garden in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She writes and speaks not only from her own experience, but also to highlight strategies, ideas, and wisdom from many creative, generous gardeners she has met in books and in real life.

Hadden's 2005 book Apprentice to a Garden is a garden memoir that chronicles the joys, challenges, and life lessons of transforming her urban yard into a naturalistic landscape. In 2008 she published Shrink Your Lawn: Design ideas for any landscape, a photo-rich book that presents many ideas and illustrations from her talks and won a silver medal from Independent Publisher's 2009 Living Now Book Awards. Her third book, Beautiful No-Mow Yards: 50 Amazing Lawn Alternatives (Timber Press, February 2012), offers over a hundred pages of inspiring example gardens plus profiles for 100 of the best ground plants for replacing lawns, design tips for eco-friendly gardens, and guidelines for making smaller and more eco-friendly lawns.

Hadden is a founding member of the national Lawn Reform Coalition, a resource for ecologically sound lawns and lawn alternatives.

Sneak Peek
View this 3-page (535KB) PDF document for a taste of Evelyn J. Hadden's colorful slideshow presentation "Design Ideas to Shrink Your Lawn."