This is a trimmed down version of a future blog I am working on for Symbiosis Tx but in general, this is my experience in killing my bermuda grass backyard lawn in a standard cookie cutter development. Hopefully there is someone out there who can follow my experience and do the same, themselves! Photos attached.

The Lawn I Inherited

In 2020, I bought my first home. With it came the stock, builder-grade Bermuda lawn. No thoughts for drainage, a couple of token plants, and a pair of live oaks in the back that I am sure were only planted because they were required to be.

This is a familiar scene across Central Texas and across much of the United States. Here in Central Texas, a region that faces increasingly precarious water scarcity contrasted with increasingly dangerous flooding, the archetypical Bermuda lawn is a stark example of our outdated approach to development.

Call it an example of innate Texan arrogance or a byproduct of older times. Either way, it is something that needs to stop.

Bermuda is a non-native, invasive species. It does not sequester water nearly as effectively as native grasses. Instead, it requires watering from already strained water resources just to stay alive. It provides little to no meaningful habitat for native wildlife. And because of its shallow root system and our insistence on keeping it cut short, it actively increases runoff and flooding.

When you start to do the math, none of this makes sense. Why do we plant what is, by all measures, a terrible choice of grass in a region that evolved robust native grasslands over millions of years?

Shortly before I joined Symbiosis full-time in January of 2025, I decided enough was enough. I was done looking out over a boring, lifeless expanse of turf. Done with the soul-draining routine of lawn care.

I made a stand. With a mattock, a shovel, and a lot of manual labor.

This is how I killed my Bermuda lawn and replaced it with a biodiverse, water-healthy, soil-healthy backyard.

Know Your Enemy

Before you launch a preemptive strike on your Bermuda foe, you need to understand your enemy. As Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War,

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

If we want any chance of winning this war, and it is very much a war, we need to understand how Bermuda works, how it spreads, and why it is so difficult to eradicate.

Cynodon dactylon (Bermuda Grass) is native to Africa, with a long history across Asia and Europe through early agriculture and trade. It entered North America during the colonial era, likely in the 1700s, carried unintentionally through shipping, ballast soil, contaminated seed, and livestock movement. At first, it was simply another hitchhiker of empire.

By the 1800s, it was being intentionally planted as forage grass across the southern United States. It tolerated heat, drought, and heavy grazing better than native species, and that made it attractive to farmers looking for reliability rather than resilience.

In the early twentieth century, Bermuda received institutional backing. Land-grant universities and agricultural extension services promoted it for pasture improvement, erosion control, and soil stabilization. What began as forage was slowly refined into turf.

After World War II, suburban development exploded. Developers needed something fast, uniform, cheap, and durable. Bermuda fit the bill. Native grasses did not.

From there, Bermuda became self-reinforcing. Sod farms specialized in it. Equipment was designed for it. HOAs codified it. Entire neighborhoods were built around its dominance.

Bermuda did not win because it was best for the land. It won because it was best for the system.

Why Bermuda Is So Hard to Kill

Bermuda does not rely on a single strategy.

Above ground, it spreads through stolons. Below ground, it spreads through rhizomes that store energy and wait out disturbance. Seed production plays a secondary role, but it allows Bermuda to exploit freshly disturbed ground the moment opportunity appears.

You can scalp it, drought it, or remove everything you see, and it will return. As long as viable rhizomes remain, Bermuda is simply waiting.

It also thrives under what we consider good lawn care. Frequent mowing favors horizontal growth. Compacted soils reduce competition. Shallow, frequent irrigation rewards plants that respond quickly at the surface.

Bermuda thrives in disturbance. Against an enemy this persistent, what possible hope do we have?

This is where Sun Tzu offers another lesson:

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

The answer is not to fight Bermuda on its terms, but to deny it the battlefield altogether.

The Solution: Deny Sunlight

Plants, in general, need three things: soil, water, and sun.

As we have already discussed, Bermuda has effectively mastered soil. Simple mechanical removal without any further intervention quickly turns into your own personal Stalingrad. You can dig, rake, and pull until exhaustion sets in, only to watch green runners reappear weeks later as if nothing ever happened.

Water is no better. In fact, watering often makes things worse.

If we mechanically remove Bermuda and immediately replace it with new plants or grasses, the moment we introduce irrigation, Bermuda almost always reasserts control. Its shallow root system responds faster than anything newly planted, exploiting surface moisture and outcompeting slower-establishing species before they ever have a chance to find their footing.

Soil is not the weakness. Water is not the weakness.

That leaves one option.

Sun.

To defeat Bermuda, we do not attack its roots endlessly or starve the entire system of water. We deny it the battlefield altogether. We force it to play a game it cannot win.

We deny it sunlight.

Sheet Mulching and Dense Planting: Changing the Rules of the Fight

Enter our two primary weapons: sheet mulching, and dense planting.

Bermuda needs sunlight to survive. Anyone who has ever had a large tree in the middle of a turf lawn has already seen this in action. Beneath the canopy, the grass thins, becomes scruffy, and eventually disappears altogether.

The idea here is simple: replicate those conditions intentionally, without waiting decades for a mature tree canopy.

Sheet mulching blocks sunlight immediately. Dense planting ensures that once the temporary barrier breaks down, there is no open ground left for Bermuda to reclaim.

At its most basic level, this begins by laying cardboard directly over the Bermuda and covering it with soil. Into that soil, we plant native or well-adapted species with dense foliage and spreading growth habits.

Beneath and between those plants, we introduce native groundcovers to occupy every gap.

The cardboard and soil act as the first line of defense. They suppress regrowth and buy time. That window, roughly as long as it takes the cardboard to break down, is critical.

During that window, the next phase takes hold.

As plants establish and mature, their foliage closes the canopy. Open soil disappears. Sunlight no longer reaches the surface. At that point, Bermuda is no longer being fought. It is simply excluded from the system.

From Theory to Practice: What This Looked Like on the Ground

Understanding the theory is one thing. Executing it on real land, with slopes, irregular shapes, and existing constraints, is another.

I began by removing the first two to three inches of soil in a large section of the yard using a mattock and shovel. This step was not strictly required for killing Bermuda, but it was part of a larger berm and swale system I was building to manage water on site.

Once the rough earthwork was complete, I marked out future beds using flags and field paint. These beds included areas where Bermuda had been mechanically removed, but also large berms constructed directly from flipped Bermuda sod.

This is worth emphasizing: building planting beds out of living Bermuda sod is about as close to a worst-case scenario as you can get. If this approach was going to fail anywhere, it would have failed here.

It didn’t.

Why I Used Ramboard Instead of Boxes

With the beds marked out, the next challenge was coverage.

Yes, you can absolutely source cardboard from boxes, local businesses, or recycling streams. For small, simple areas, that works fine. In this case, the scale, shape, and topography of the site made that approach unnecessarily difficult.

That’s why I used Ramboard.

Ramboard is a heavy-duty, recycled paperboard product typically used in construction to protect floors during remodels. It comes in large rolls, lays flat, and resists tearing, curling, and shifting. On slopes and irregular ground, this matters more than you might expect.

For our purposes, Ramboard functioned as continuous, oversized cardboard. We could roll it out quickly, cut it cleanly around trees and terrain, overlap seams to prevent light leaks, and secure it in place without constantly fighting the material.

Just as importantly, it is biodegradable. Over time, it breaks down just like traditional cardboard, contributing carbon while doing its job of blocking sunlight.

Simply roll it out, cut to shape, secure it with landscaping staples, and repeat until everything is covered.

Building Up: Soil, Mulch, and Time

Once the Ramboard was in place, the goal shifted from suppression to construction.

Soil was added directly on top. Not a deep layer. Just enough to give roots a place to establish while the Ramboard worked below. This approach builds upward instead of digging down, preserving what soil structure already exists.

After soil came mulch.

Mulch plays multiple roles at once. It reduces evaporation, moderates soil temperature, blocks stray light, and creates a welcoming environment for soil life. That biological activity accelerates the breakdown of the Ramboard and helps knit the system together faster.

At this point, the landscape begins to change character. What was once compacted turf becomes a layered system: barrier, soil, organic cover, and living plants.

The battlefield has been reshaped. Now it must be occupied.

Planting Strategy: Density, Diversity, and Intent

This is where the system becomes personal.

Your plant choices should reflect your goals, aesthetics, and conditions. That said, the strategy hinges on two non-negotiables: native groundcovers, and native or well-adapted plants with dense, spreading foliage.

As long as those boxes are checked, the system works.

I planted extremely densely, with spacing rarely exceeding a foot. The mix included multiple salvias (Salvia spp.), lantanas, copper canyon daisy (Tagetes lemmonii), and other spreading, sun-loving species.

Over the course of a year or two, the foliage will grow together into a single, continuous layer, blocking sunlight from ever reaching the soil surface.

Beneath that layer, I planted frogfruit (Phyla nodiflora).

Frogfruit is my secret weapon against Bermuda. It is native, aggressive in growth, easily propagated, and highly valuable to pollinators. Within six months, it had consumed the entire underlayer and begun pushing outward into remaining Bermuda patches beyond the system.

In areas where I expected the hardest resistance, particularly along the edges, I planted Powis Castle artemisia (Artemisia × ‘Powis Castle’). Its dense, spreading habit creates a living wall that prevents Bermuda from creeping back in from the outside.

What to Expect: Patience Required

This process is not instantaneous, and it does not look polished right away.

There is an awkward phase. The system wants to look messy before it looks intentional. This is where many people lose confidence and intervene too much. You have to be patient and accept that good things come with time.

The timeline generally looks like this:

• Months 0–1: Installation and planting
• Months 1–6: Establishment and minor Bermuda pressure
• Months 6–12: Canopy closure and sharp decline
• Year 2 and beyond: A largely self-maintaining system

Maintenance: From Defense to Stewardship

This entire system receives regular water from my rainwater irrigation system. Even with that added moisture, I have had virtually zero need for Bermuda management since installation.

The system is not even fully mature yet, and I expect maintenance demands to drop further as it closes in completely.

At this point, maintenance is aesthetic. Shaping plants. Guiding growth. Occasionally reminding the frogfruit not to consume the dry creek bed.

To be clear, this is not zero work. But its an upfront investment of work to not only save yourself from the tedium of lawncare, but also an investment back into the land from which you come from.

Instead of constant extraction and correction, the work becomes occasional and intentional. And, importantly, the system improves with time rather than degrading.

At a larger scale, this stuff adds up.

Across the Hill Country, we keep putting shallow turf on compacted soil and then act surprised when we see more runoff, erosion, and stressed water supplies. Bermuda lawns do not hold water well, they do not build soil, and they do not age gracefully in this climate without constant input.

This is not about aesthetics or personal preference. It is about whether our landscapes work with the land they sit on.

There are alternatives that perform better, cost less over time, and create fewer downstream problems. They are not experimental. They are proven. They just are not the default yet.