When the subject of gardening comes up, my first thought is "flamethrower". Then "goats".

I suspect the deeper I get into this, the more practical both of those will seem.

Where are you, Zen, Virginia? Here's a possible resource: [link] If there's a nearish univversity you might check for Master Gardener and Ag programs, they often have free stuff available to the community - worms, plants, information, etc. There's a nonprofit in my county that has been transforming people's yards as sort of showcases of sustainable practices, might be something like that near you, too. Ours is called Sustainable Solano if that helps at all.

It's a darned shame the neighbors and the city object to the avant garde landscape style "urban feral meadow".

Missouri Botanical Garden has the BEST plant finder website - [link]

Plan It Wild is a great resource for native plant gardening - [link]

I would recommend finding a local nursery rather than a big box store with a garden center - Home Depot in particular has a strong bias towards colorful annuals vs native pollinators.

For ornamental grasses, I like carex and bluestem. For shrubs, New Jersey Tea and Chokeberry require basically zero maintenance. Foamflower is nice, and moderately shade-tolerant.

If you're looking to replace your ENTIRE lawn, the easiest thing to do would be to cover it right now in black plastic, put stakes in so it won't blow away, and then wait until September to plant your new shrubs and grasses. The plastic will kill the grass that's there now so in the fall you'll have a blank canvass to start from.

If you don't want to do the entire lawn at once, Plan it Wild also sells these fantastic kits that will cover 9 square feet at a time: [link]

"urban feral meadow"

That would be my preferred style.

-t, that's also a great idea. University of Virginia is right here and probably has an Ag program.

Jessica, I'm not replacing the whole lawn at once, it's more than I can handle. These are great ideas, thank you! Plan It Wild is exactly what I was looking for.

The nice thing about planting natives is their drought resistance, at least here in California. The lady showing me her yard full of native landscaping was really happy about not having to water it.

We are actively encouraging white violets to take over as much of our lawn as possible. they are native to Minnesota and we spend less time mowing.

I've become a little obsessed with pollinator pathways lately, so I'm planting native pollinator "islands" in the back yard around the borders, and will tackle the front next year. In the short term I'm just letting the clover take over but my end goal is native part-shade meadow.