How Your Messy Yard Can Help Nature

 

Despite being named Oregon State Gardener of the Year last year in 2023, my front yard is a constant embarrassment to me.  It is NOT like the other, “well-tended” yards in my neighborhood.  It is weedy and rangy and has dead stems and flower stalks all over it.  Dry leaves are piled up under all the shrubs and trees.  I even have what we refer to as a ‘dragon nest’- a structure I made from with woody debris from coppicing my hazelnuts, red twig dogwood, and serviceberry.  I wove these materials into a wattle compost container.  This holds other woody debris and leaves in a brush pile.  All of these have been deliberately left – as messy as they are – to support insect life and the birds that come to feed upon them. 

 

Leaving the leaves, as the Xerces Society advocates, has much to recommend it.  Leaves provide winter cover for small invertebrates and insects who help break down the carbon in the leaf mulch and return nutrients to the soil in the form of their waste.  Soil bacteria break down those waste products further to provide nutrients that plants and mycorrhizal fungi can then access.  Soil under leaves is rich in carbon, nutrients, soil life, and holds moisture longer, allowing plants to access all.  Winter birds forage in this rich mix and find critical food during the coldest months.  

 

While I am not above feeling guilty about how my yard appears, I still persist. Because I know that neatly mown, raked and leaf blown yards provide none of this forage and none of these soil services.  So, while my neighbors think they are being good citizens, they are merely addressing the eye candy that humans have been trained to look for in our managed landscapes. Nature is never considered. And nature pays the price. 

I have 39 species of birds that visit my pitifully small corner lot in Medford.  There they find winter seed heads to feed from, leaves to dig through to find isopods, overwintering fly, moth and butterfly larvae, earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, and other winter food.  I do not see this activity in or on any of the other yards in my neighborhood.  The flower stems and stalks of the perennials, though blackened and bent from winter storms, are home to stem nesting native bees, which can also provide larvae to birds who drill into the stems for food.  Lizards and snakes can safely shed their skins and find winter hibernation spots under the wood chips, pine bark and small logs I place under my shrubs.  Toads and salamanders will often find homes under decomposing wood piles and logs placed strategically under shrubbery.   

 

As I went to collect the mail yesterday, I thought, “I had better do some clean-up along the sidewalk and the gutter.” But then I realized that all along the edge of my yard, the leaves had been scraped hectically onto the sidewalk as robins and flickers foraged through them.  Each small dark scrape in the leaf litter represented a bird that had been fed by my yard.  I resolutely left the leaves where they were in the gutter and on the sidewalk and came inside to write this article instead.   

 

Leaves are not LITTER.  Leaves are HABITAT.   

Change your view of gardening, and GARDEN FOR LIFE! 

 

For more resources and information visit the Xerces site listed here:  Leave the Leaves!