Free your garden and mind without upsetting your neighbors, starting by leaving a dead tree or repurposing fallen limbs.
An overarching goal of mine is helping gardeners avoid dead-end ruts, which to me starts with the never-ending struggle to maintain a static, same old, same old landscape of tightly pruned plants and wall to wall grass.
I’m talking about the standard contractor’s landscape installation most of us have bought into, a moustache of gumdrop-shaped evergreen bushes hugging a house’s foundation and trees plunked like lollipops in a sea of lawn. This approach got mainstreamed with the advent of sprawling suburbs, mass-produced plants, affordable lawn mowers, and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which quickly seized upon and pushed hard by marketers into the accepted norm.
Not being judgmental here, because the typical suburban landscape parodied in the Edward Scissorhands movie offers an easy recipe to follow plus opportunities in pride in good maintenance. Most of us need a solid ontological sense of personal and societal security by fitting in somewhat; keeping things orderly and calm brings stability - important in today’s weird world.
You can still be self-expressive without being kicked out of the club. Discreetly color outside the lines by adding a flower bed and pots of seasonal color here and there, loosening up on the shrub shearing, and maybe replacing the college mascot figure with a small single-color glass bottle tree.
But one of the easiest concepts I have seen, acceptable yet still challenges our communal sense of what is right, has actually been trending for several years in major flower shows and botanic gardens: the deliberate leaving of a dead tree or half rotten stump, or repurposing fallen limbs as path edging, stacked “dead hedges” or naturalistic vine supports.
Whether done for convenience, cost- or effort-cutting, superb wildlife habitat, or just being artistic along the lines of the Japanese art of wabi-sabi, which is the acceptance of imperfection and transience. Like how a Pennsylvania flower show designer friend always includes a single dandelion in his award-winning show gardens. Or putting a weathered water bucket or some boots by the doorstep. Leaving the garden hose unrolled, to indicate activity.
An easy place to start is to simply leave a dead tree in place if it won’t hit anything when it falls. In forest ecology this is called a “snag” and provides crucial nesting and food sources for owls, flying squirrels, honeybees, and dozens of other critters, large and small, plus everything that they eat or are eaten by. If you must cut it down, drag the remains to one side and leave ‘em be.
Step farther: if you have a shaded spot, create a stumpery, a natural focal point with wizened old stumps and carefully placed logs and limbs, accessorized with striped liriope, ferns, hellebores, ajuga, hosta, dwarf nandina, mahonia, and other shade plants; enjoy how the original stumps sprout mosses and interesting mushrooms. You can find inspiration by going to felderrushing.blog and typing stumpery in the search box.
I was first inspired along these lines by the late Neal Odenwald, professor emeritus of the landscape architecture school at LSU. He had connected the trunks of backyard trees with rows of fallen debris, which quickly composted into ideal soil for azaleas and other shade plants. It cut his lawn mowing, leaf raking, and limb dragging time by half and still looked tasteful.
Just a thought for breaking out of the mold safely, one sculptural snag or fallen limb at a time. Add a slice of real nature, wildlife and all, and let the conversations flow from there.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
