To the avid vegetable gardener, a lawn is just wasted space. Why grow grass when you could be growing salad greens and herbs?

But there's a way to have your lawn, and eat it, too - or steep it, more precisely. English gardeners know that chamomile makes a great groundcover, but in the U.S., chamomile is thought of mostly as an herb for tea.

And that's our loss, because a lawn of chamomile is a fragrant, ferny green mat that you can walk on. You can sow it from seed, or plant seedlings; just be sure to plant the perennial kind, Roman chamomile, and not the annual German chamomile (both are fine for making tea, but only the Roman chamomile is suited for lawns).