I never thought I’d fall in love with lizards. Beady eyes, rough skin, cold blood—there seemed too much to overcome. I appreciated lizards, but it was all very academic: I valued them for preying on insects and being food for other animals. My admiration was cerebral, distant, and soulless, until the day I began digging up my lawn and communed with a baby lizard.

The lawn had been on my to-do list ever since my husband and I had bought the house in La Cañada, California. Not only was the lawn water- and maintenance-intensive, its continued upkeep signaled acquiescence to a nationwide head-in-the-sand aesthetic: Never mind that we’re in an extinction crisis and lawns are NOT habitat. Never mind that the seventy million pounds of pesticides we use on our lawns poison us, too. Never mind that one gas mower annually spews about a hundred pounds of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air. Never mind that California is in near-perpetual drought. Never mind. It’s all about how things look.

Lawns—ridiculous nineteenth-century holdovers conceived as displays of socioeconomic status—have become the most-grown crop in the United States, requiring about nine billion gallons of water daily for more than forty million acres virtually barren of insect and other animal life. Suburban paradise? More like collective insanity.

From the moment we moved into the house, I tried not to participate. I rarely gave the lawn more than rainwater. Every time I turned on the sprinklers, I felt guilty about depleting distant river systems and diminishing groundwater. Fertilizers, like pesticides, were out of the question; I didn’t want to add nitrogen runoff to Santa Monica Bay and contribute to algae blooms that suffocate fish. Starving the lawn of water and nutrients was the compromise for maintaining a semblance of a play area for our daughters. Around the lawn, I replaced exotic shrubs with natives to bring more bugs, butterflies, birds, and other wildlife to the yard. The partial fix worked. But by the time our daughters entered middle and high school, venturing into the backyard only to talk on their cell phones or empty the trash, the lawn had clearly outlived its purpose. Time to get rid of it entirely.

So, one spring, when the rains ended early and the heat started with a vengeance, I used natural circumstances to begin the lawn’s transition to a native and edible garden.

For nearly four months, the grass withered in relentless, baking heat. By the end of July, there was only a dull green hue to the blades, but they were still flexible, still stubbornly alive. I regretted having inured the grass to such a small amount of water. I dreaded that the summer hiatus would not be enough to kill the grass and worried that it would limp along until the rains started again in late autumn. So in the broiling heat of August, I celebrated when the dull green faded to the color of straw and the blades broke under my feet. The grass seemed well and truly dead.

That same week, a new crop of elderberry trees was ready for sale at my local native nursery. I’d wanted to plant an elderberry in the lawn for years—the tree is a magnet for pollinators and other wildlife—but hadn’t wanted to impinge on the kids’ already small play space. The sudden availability of the trees seemed serendipitous, so the only correct response was to bring one home.

August is perhaps the worst time to plant in Southern California, but I figured that the sapling would fare better in the ground than in its black plastic pot that concentrated heat at the root tips. I carved a large circle in the crunchy grass, dug out the mat of desiccated roots, soaked the planting hole several times, and planted the elderberry. Then I watered deeply, applied a thick layer of mulch, and shaded the tree with an umbrella to decrease transplanting stress. I thought there would be no need to dig out the rest of the grass. I expected it to act like mulch and decompose into the soil. Trouble was, the grass was Bermuda, one of the most tenacious grasses in the world. And when I watered the elderberry, the Bermuda came roaring back to life.

With only a few months left before the start of the winter rains, digging out the grass seemed the only solution. I procrastinated. Not because of the hard physical labor involved, but because of the sheer boredom of it. The repetitiousness of cutting through the mat of straw-like blades and roots, teasing away the dry clumps of soil, and starting on the next shovel-sized square, only to do the same thing over and over again—for four hundred square feet. I also procrastinated because I imagined that delight would come only far in the future, when the garden was established. How wrong I was.

I buckled down to the onerous task on a morning slightly cooler than most. The air was filled with the scent of dry earth and an overlay of smog. With a large spade, I cut a square-foot outline into the brittle grass and hard ground, then slid the blade under the square and flipped it like a pancake onto an old sheet. Dry white roots bristled across the underside of the square and a few ants frantically tried to orient themselves to the disruption. On the newly exposed patch of ground, ants swarmed in the sudden sunlight that flooded the tunnels of their nest. And as I stood there watching, a lizard not much larger than an acorn darted onto the patch, slurped up a few ants, and perched on a nearby boulder.

The lizard was buff-colored with brown and black speckles. Like any baby, the lizard’s head was oversized for his body, and his stubby arms and legs made him look even more like an infant. The lizard crouched on the boulder, watching me, alert and ready to run if need be.

I watched the lizard from the corner of my eye so I wouldn’t frighten him with direct eye contact. Slowly, very slowly, staying more than an arm’s length away, I sat down on the grass so I wouldn’t tower over him. Then, equally slowly, I raised my head until I was looking directly into his eyes. Fringed by arcs of scales, his eyes were brown-black orbs that looked disproportionately large for his tiny face. The lizard cocked his head this way and that, looking at me from different angles. For so small a being, he was remarkably self-possessed. He showed none of the skittishness that I imagined I would feel in the presence of a creature so much larger than myself.

Not wanting to make any sudden moves that might frighten him off, I rose very slowly and, with circumscribed movements, dug out another square of lawn. The lizard stayed on the boulder, watching my every move. I sliced through the dead roots of the grass and flipped the square onto the sheet. Just like before, ants swarmed across the patch of newly exposed earth.

The lizard looked at the ants, and then at me.

“It’s okay,” I said, “I won’t hurt you,” and retreated a couple of steps.

The lizard darted down to the newly exposed earth and lunged this way and that. The ants scurried about, diving into the safety of their tunnels, but not always quickly enough. When the lizard finished, he retreated to his boulder and gave me what could only be described as an expectant look.

This time, I dug with more speed and movement. The lizard was unperturbed. I slid the blade of my shovel under another square of grass and flipped it over. In an extraordinary demonstration of trust, the lizard scuttled down while I was still within arm’s reach. No more than two feet from me, the lizard lapped up every ant he could get. I felt honored by his trust. Whether it was due to the innocence of the young or desperation for a good meal made no difference.

As before, when finished, the lizard retreated to his boulder and looked at me. I dug out another square, the lizard lapped up more ants and, for the next few hours, the lawn steadily diminished through an exchange I had never imagined possible. It was a revelation. I had dreaded digging up the lawn. Before the actual doing of it, I had thought the removal process would be nothing more than a tedious task. But because of this little creature, the process brought unexpected joy. Our impromptu partnership felt like a dance—an affirmation of my effort to heal and reanimate this small piece of land. An effort spurred by the fact that much of the Southern California landscape is among the most damaged on Earth.

Perhaps no other sub/urban conglomeration in the United States has so profoundly devastated the natural environment through the near-complete replacement of its native vegetation by exotic species. This replacement has left the food web in tatters. So much damage has been done that many people can’t imagine what the land once looked like: oak savannas and woodlands, sycamore- and willow-shaded streams, prairies of bunchgrasses and wildflowers, with fragrant sage scrub near the coast and chaparral in the inland mountains. Nor can people imagine the abundance of wildlife these landscapes once supported. The region’s 150 species of butterflies are a strong hint—Southern California is still, surprisingly, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But people settle for the colonial artifacts of lawn and exotic plants. Settle for a landscape relationship that is nothing more than a dead end.

In establishing a native and edible garden, I hoped to push back against the blight of exotic plants that make much of Southern California a green wasteland. With the native garden, I hoped to honor relationships that had once been everywhere between roots, mycorrhizae, and soil, between caterpillars and plants for forage, between flowers, fruit, and seasons, between heat and dormancy, rain and growth. I hoped to feel part of something larger than myself, hoped to feel that I was simply one of many beings in the continuum between the soil and the trees. And in that continuum I hoped to experience moments that made me feel part of a positive alternative to the destruction of the natural world. My communion with the lizard was a very good start.

Hours later, with great sadness, I dug out the last square of lawn. I flipped it onto the sheet and watched the lizard gobble some ants and then, just as before, retreat to his boulder and look at me.

“It’s all done,” I said, gesturing at the bare earth. “There’s nothing more to do.” The entire lawn around the elderberry—all four hundred square feet—was gone.

For a long moment, the lizard stared at me. All was quiet in the garden but for the deep buzz of the carpenter bees pollinating the white sage, the sharp clicks of the hummingbird swooping back and forth over the patch of California fuchsia, and the chattering of the goldfinches in the buckwheat. I put down my shovel. Still staring at me, the lizard blinked a few times, and then darted away.

I felt a pang. But now, when I encounter a blue-bellied western fence lizard or a turquoise-speckled side-blotched lizard or a brown-black alligator lizard, I love them all. Beady eyes, rough skin, cold blood? No problem. Relationship is everything.