Admit it: Turf isn't the most stimulating plant in the landscape.

A calm carpet of green can't compare to flashy home improvement projects; renovating the lawn is about as exciting as doing your taxes. Even lawmakers scorn the sod, mowing a request for $21 million to replace the turf on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., from President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.

Purchasing and installing tall fescue/Kentucky bluegrass sod runs 35 cents per square foot, or approximately $4.5 million for the 300-acre area, said Mark Weekley, vice president of Chantilly Turf Farms Inc. in Aldie, Va. That price tag doesn't include transportation, amendments, equipment or irrigation upgrades, which could account for the remaining $16.5 million.

But legislators saw red over the request and cut the grass from plans to pick up the economy. Yet, whether it's your 1,000 square-foot lawn or the 300-acre National Mall, this plant packs a fiscal powerhouse for increasing property value, making it a good investment.

A Michigan State University study found that updating your landscape boosts your property's worth by 5 percent to 11 percent, something Washington might keep in mind if it wants to increase its value. Turf renovation brings the greatest return on dollars spent - 400 percent at the time of sale, according to a homegain.com survey of Realtors in 2000. Flowers, trees and vegetables return as much as 200 percent.

Turf has the added bonus of sequestering carbon from the air and storing it in the soil, and trees do this as well. Working together, the bipartisan effort of trees and turf means the air above Washington will be cleansed, of carbon at least, for the next 25 years.

Still, some believe lawns are wasteful; these advocates insist that a better use of the space is as a food garden. For homeowners, reducing yards to practical sizes is a good choice, helping to reduce water use and pollution from fertilizers or gas-powered mowers.

Converting your space to a vegetable patch works at home, but the National Mall is a public place, where 16 million people walk, run, picnic and play every year. It's hard to have a game of Frisbee if gardeners are chasing you with a hoe, and if it's a bad year for grasshoppers, visitors might be left with the impression that Washington is overcome by a plague of locusts.

"The Mall's always been a hellacious place to grow turf," said Tony Koski, Extension turf specialist with Colorado State University. "The soil's lousy, compaction's a problem and then there are all those people. The best thing to do is rebuild it entirely and go with a sand-based soil. They could try that. You can get a lot of good soil prep for the rest of that money."

Putting together a budget for lawn renovation is the first step anyone should do before jumping into the project, experts suggest, and leading by example, the National Park Service - which maintains the Mall - pulled together bids for every step of the process.

"My dad went down there and talked to them when they were putting together their plan," said Weekley, whose company has resodded parts of the Mall over the years. "They didn't want lots of stuff, just asked what it would cost to till up what was there and resod it."

With the turf taken out of the stimulus plan, we won't be changing the lyrics to America the Beautiful to "for emerald waves of grass" anytime soon. But if you're interested in putting pep in your property value, a little green goes a long way.

Carol O'Meara, a local gardening expert, may be reached at omearac@yahoo.com