Hi Denny, and glad you asked because I don't' like black plastic - anywhere in the garden. You can easily smother your lawn and then plant natives and groundcovers just by putting down a layer of damp newspapers (5 to 10 pages thick) and then adding topsoil and compost and start planting. If you don't have soil to layer on top of the newspapers then pile on the mulch of wood chips and wait a few months for the lawn below to die. Then you can move aside the mulch, cut into the newspaper layer and start planting. Keep growing, Marianne Binetti