Bill was introduced in Sep/25, but I only got a whiff of it in the last couple of weeks
See House Bill HB1878: https://fastdemocracy.com/bill-search/pa/2025-2026/bills/PAB00038963/
Are there any other states/countries taking similar initiatives?
Summary:
Pennsylvania homeowners deserve the right to choose native plant species they desire for landscaping around their homes. However, work is needed to remove bottlenecks for homeowners to select native vegetation for their desired landscaping.
This legislation will prevent homeowners associations (HOAs) from unreasonably prohibiting the use of native plants for landscaping on private property. This ensures homeowners residing within an HOA the same ability to choose native landscaping as other homeowners.
Native plants provide many beneficial functions that many homeowners desire. These include being aesthetically pleasing and providing habitat for pollinators while being adapted to the site and typically requiring lower maintenance than non-native plants. [...]
Oh, shit, right, so I get to share something I learned fairly recently.
For much of human history, wealth could be measured many ways but by far the most powerful currency was land. Land meant resources, and the land's value was determined by what respirce it produced: fertile floodplains meant crops, lakes for fishing, forests for hunting, and, worst-case scenario, moorland could be used for grazing livestock. But what if that wasn't enough? What if you had huge tracts of land but your narcissism and insecurity were so overwhelming that you just needed to prove yourself even more?
Enter: lawns. Lawns are fields of grass, which is a useless crop that can only really be used for grazing. But the grass is kept so short that livestock can't graze on it. But grass like that can only be grown on plains that are ideal for crops, so you need to get rid of the crops. And short grass needs tending, tending with more care than any crop, so you need to have workers dedicated to it. That's what a lawn is: it's bragging, it's saying "not only do I have loads of top-quality land and an army of workers, I can afford to piss away huge swathes of it for absolutely no reason other than to prove that I can." It's hard to image a greater and more grotesque display of boujee excess than the lawn.
Of course, this is what makes the modern lawn all the more pathetic: that neatly parcelled-out vast tract of land you can afford to squander as a display of your immeasurable wealth is, like, a few meters across. It's like the Stamford apes experiment: they know what they must do, but not why they're doing it and, if they knew what a lawn really was and where it came from, I can't imagine many would be quite so attached. Then again, maybe they would be. Maybe they really do think their home is a castle and that they live in a kingdom they can walk around in thirty second.