The Home Garden: A Primer in Dysfunction

Pillbugs (also known as Roly-poly Bugs or Woodlice), are often found underneath flower pots. They are not insects, but rather, land crustaceans. Their function in the environment is to help recycle dead plant and animal matter, which is why you see them in association with planter pots. Yet, extension offices often refer to them as “pests” and tell gardeners to get rid of them! Ignorance of the true roles of our fellow life forms endangers the proper functioning of the environment that supports all of us.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

From 2002-2014, I gave monthly talks each summer in Shenandoah National Park. Most of the questions after each talk were from gardeners wanting to know how to prevent the trouble they encountered with this animal or that one.

 

At first this situation puzzled me. I’d gardened throughout my adult life and never encountered these many problems. I puzzled over it following each presentation, until I realized people had these difficulties because they ignored the fact that their gardens exist in the natural world. Thus, you have no choice but to follow natural laws, as I had always done.

 

Unfortunately, folks don’t like that answer. They want to continue doing their gardening in whatever manner they please, as if the natural world is going to bend to their will. Except it won’t. And therein lies the reason gardeners who ignore my philosophy (as they would see it; I see it as presenting a fact of life) are doomed to rant forevermore about various kinds of wildlife that are problematic for them.

 

So, let’s look at just a few of the “truisms” in gardening lore that not only make unnecessary work for the gardener, but are also detrimental to wildlife and the environment.

 

As summer draws to a close and fall arrives, gardening experts issue the same axiom year after year: Clean up your garden to keep pest problems at a minimum. However, if you have a yard that’s wildlife friendly, this task is totally unnecessary. It deprives many organisms of needed winter food and cover, and over time, bankrupts the soil nutrition available for growing plants.

 

While it’s true that some insects overwinter as adults or eggs in plant stalks, it’s also true that many animals will find these insects and eat them. Wrens and woodpeckers will come to bird feeders to get sunflower seeds, but they mainly subsist upon insects all the year around. They can be in big trouble if we have a harsh winter with lots of snow. But, if you leave plants standing, especially tall ones, these birds gain a better chance of surviving because they may find insects or their eggs on the stems rising above snow level.

 

Deer Mice also eat insects. While you probably care more about birds than these mammals—thinking all rodents are “pests”—consider that mice help to replant our forests and grasslands. They are Mother Nature’s gardeners, carrying seeds back to their nests and dropping some along the way that may then grow where they fell.

 

It’s easy to overlook the fact that every creature does its part to keep the other parts of the ecosystem functioning properly, but humans need to recognize this actuality. Even though you don’t want mice in your house, you should certainly welcome them outdoors, and not only because they are inadvertent gardeners. Mice are a prime food source for owls, foxes, and coyotes.

 

A gardening myth is that you must keep your plants totally “bug-free” to keep them healthy. Healthy plants can withstand a few insects chewing or sucking on them. Remember, plants exist to feed animals (“Marlene’s Axiom”). There’s no need to run for insecticide at the first sign of a few six-legged critters, especially as many of these insects will be eaten if you’ve created a yard that welcomes predators.

 

For example, many gardeners worry about aphids, yet they are unlikely to cause significant damage in a yard full of birds. Hummingbirds, especially, require such tiny insects to obtain protein and fat for good health. Remove aphids and you remove a significant food source for these energetic creatures.

 

You’ve probably also heard that you shouldn’t allow your plants to go to seed. According to Penn State Extension: “When dead blooms are left clinging to flowering plants, they sap the nutrition and strength from the core of the plants and rob them of the energy to produce new and colorful blooms.”

 

https://extension.psu.edu/to-deadhead-or-not-your-final-answer-is

 

Nonsense! A plant’s ultimate “goal” is to reproduce, so it’s well adapted to making seeds and continuing to bloom (if in its DNA) and grow each year. Spend time deadheading (removing all “spent” blooms) and you perform busywork that deprives your local wildlife of seeds.

 

Lastly, anywhere you plan to cover bare ground with mulch, you should instead let some “weeds” grow. They serve as your natural mulch. Rather than stealing water, they keep the ground shaded to prevent moisture loss, and many turn into lovely flowers that provide beauty for the gardener, nectar for hummingbirds, butterflies, and/or numerous other kinds of insects, and possibly seeds for birds and small mammals when left standing throughout fall and winter.

 

Save time and energy by gardening in a more relaxed manner, and you’ll help our wildlife while you’re at it. Your reward will be the opportunity to watch nature at work instead of you!

 

 NATURE ADVICE:

 

Instead of taking away the fallen leaves of woody plants, you really should rake them around the main stem and out to the limit of the plant’s branches. Shrubs and trees provide their own mulch free of charge. The leaves they drop are Mother Nature’s way of returning “borrowed” nutrients to the soil (when the leaves decompose) from which they came.

 

If you prefer the look of woody mulch, keep the spent leaves and just place the woody mulch over them. But remember: The woody mulch needs to decompose (all organic matter is supposed to be recycled in nature), so if you see mushrooms or other kinds of fungi growing upon the mulch, leave them be! They won’t be visible long, and these decomposers are doing their job of returning nutrients to the soil so you don’t need to spend money, time, and effort fertilizing your growing plants.

At What Price, Perfection?

If you purchase today’s version of the “perfect” Christmas tree (seen here), you may find it is much too densely branched for ornaments to hang from. Instead, tinsel and decorations will lie upon the branches, which isn’t nearly as attractive as in days of yore when they hung freely.

 

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

“Perfection” means free from flaws or defects, and it’s a state of existence many people relentlessly chase these days. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, $15 billion dollars was spent in America alone for beauty procedures in 2016. And the Japan Times reported that $10.7 billion was spent in 2017 on just the materials and chemicals practitioners used to perform these cosmetic procedures worldwide.

The price of physical “beauty” is not just in terms of money, but also in terms of real pain and risk for those who choose surgery, not to mention the price of wasting your life (time is something I consider more valuable than almost anything) on something that is ridiculously overvalued.

 

Presumably the point of beauty is to be admired and/or to find someone to love you, yet being beautiful is not in and of itself likely to bring you genuine happiness; it’s likely that even the most gorgeous woman and handsome man have been cheated on. That says a lot (or, at least, it should) about the value of great looks alone in terms of endearment to others.

 

People nowadays are even concerned with how their pets look. According to the New York Post, dogs are getting nose and/or ear jobs, face-lifts, and even testicular implants so male dogs “can regain their masculinity”! Although some procedures, as with people, are done for medical purposes, they are far fewer in number than those for simply aesthetic reasons. In 2011, pet owners—more often known these days as pet “parents”—forked over $62 million in plastic surgery for their pets.

 

Folks are free to decide how much money they want to spend and how much pain they are willing to endure for their own sense of flawlessness. But is it ethical to subject animals to aesthetic surgical procedures they get nothing out of except great discomfort?

 

This infatuation with “physical excellence” in human society borders upon madness. It not only places at risk and brings pain to pets going under the knife for invalid reasons, but it has also come at great cost to the quality of everyone’s everyday lives.

 

Decades ago, when I was in my twenties and had fallen in love with the man of my dreams, I received a dozen long-stemmed red roses from him for my birthday. Oh, the fragrance of those roses! It was divine. Less than a decade later, when I had to undergo serious surgery that I was terrified of having, a dear friend also chose to send me a dozen long-stemmed red roses. The cut flowers still held the marvelous rose essence that was able to carry my thoughts away from the hospital and the intense pain of my surgery.

 

But by the end of the 1990s, the scent was gone. I couldn’t believe that this emblematic feature of roses had so thoroughly disappeared, and I also couldn’t imagine how it could have been allowed to happen. It was perhaps my first brush with this new world in which physical “perfection” plays such a dominant role in so many aspects of everyday life.

 

The rose fragrance was sacrificed on the alter of “beauty”. Gardeners growing their own roses preferred new pastel colors that were not biologically linked to the heavenly scent of red roses. Florists who wanted access to roses from around the world needed hardier specimens that could withstand travel and last longer in the customer’s hands, and the plants bred to meet these standards lost their scent in the process.

 

There has been equal demand for looks over substance in the food industry, with equally regrettable results. Apples are especially noticeable victims of this trend, with most of the commercial varieties looking like the artificial wax fruits that adorned my mother’s dining-room fruit bowl when I was growing up. Their “perfect” looks belie their loss of great apple flavor, not to mention nutrition.

 

The lack of robust flavor and aroma in strawberries ranks right up there with the rose situation as a truly lamentable development. Time was when you would bite into a strawberry that was fully red inside and chock-full of sweet juice. Now these fruits tend to be mostly white inside—even if bought from a local farmer—and, not surprisingly, flavorless by comparison.

 

I used to make strawberry ice cream following a recipe that suggested you might want to add red food coloring, but the naturally red and tasty juice made such an addition totally unnecessary. I can’t even imagine making my own ice cream from the strawberries on today’s market.

 

Then there are the Christmas trees. I’ve always adored these decorative icons of the month of December, whether they be the fake tree we had during my youth, the Eastern Red-cedars cut for free from a farmer’s pasture during my college years, or a field-grown White Pine Christmas tree bought from a parking lot when I was a young adult.

 

The beauty of these trees came from their openness. Ornaments hung down in all their colorful glory in the spaces between branches, and free-hanging shiny tinsel augmented the glow of the lights, be they big or small. The trees looked as real (albeit decorated) as when they’d been growing in a forest or field (unless, of course, they were the pink, white, or blue aluminum trees some folks liked in the ‘60s), and even the fake ones mimicked the airiness of natural trees.

 

These Christmas trees gave you a sense of connectedness to the environment, a little bit of the outdoors brought inside for a special holiday. In contrast, today’s overly sheared trees evoke the hand of man, not nature.

 

The trees are pruned to make them grow in a “perfect pyramid” shape (Christmas tree-grower lingo for "much wider at the bottom than at the top"). If they aren’t “full enough”, the lateral branches are sheared to increase density. But the thickness of the branches doesn’t allow tinsel and ornaments to hang freely as they are supposed to do, making the trees far less attractive because the ornaments instead lie directly upon the greenery.

 

I’m guessing that someone decided that live Christmas trees should look as they are drawn in cartoons and on cards and other stationery. Indeed, they now do, which means they look as artificial as Christmas tree-shaped jewelry.

 

Perhaps artificiality is to be expected when such a large percentage of the populace spends a good deal of time living in a virtual world instead of a real one. But folks should be careful about “improving” Mother Nature. In many cases, they end up eradicating the very qualities that made things extraordinary, making the price of “perfection” way too high.

 

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

Before bringing your live Christmas tree into the house, be sure to check it over for mantid egg cases. Otherwise, immature mantids might hatch out (due to the heat) inside your home, where they will have nothing to eat and will die.

 

When you find an egg case, cut off the entire branch. Do your best to position it within the branches of a shrub, with the egg mass in its original orientation. Try not to leave the egg mass obviously exposed because birds feed upon mantid eggs.

 

You can visit the site below to read descriptions of the mantid egg cases of three commonly encountered species.

 

https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/mantids-mantises

Correcting the Narrative

Correcting the Narrative

Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) decorates a Washington (Olympic Peninsula) clearcut in this slide taken in the 1980s. A clearcut is hardly recognizable as such when it regrows, and it provides for a variety of wildlife dependent upon successional sites.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 If you care about the natural world, you’ve probably depended upon conservation organizations for information because you believe them to be knowledgeable and trustworthy. But can you take what they tell you as gospel? Not necessarily.

 

In the 1980s-90s, the Sierra Club provided the narrative regarding clearcuts (areas of forest cut down for timber), telling us how bad they were for the environment. Few people, if any, would have doubted this perspective because, to human eyes, a clearcut appears as a site of total devastation.

 

However, forest regeneration provides habitat for wildlife, too—although not for all the original inhabitants. A variety of other kinds of critters depend upon such “disasters” to create open habitat they need for the perpetuation of their kind, as I discovered while birding clearcuts. I found many species of avian creatures, along with butterflies, rabbits, lizards, etc. My experience belied the Sierra Club stance.

 

A close birding friend of mine had also realized clearcuts provided for warblers and other species when the land next door to his house was completely logged. But while he didn’t hesitate to admit that fact to me, he would never have dared to breathe a word of it to anyone else. People tend to be terrified to go against the prevailing narrative, lest they be ostracized. No one wants to be banished from his social circles.

 

But signing on to a false narrative is not at all helpful to Mother Nature. You can’t possibly make the proper choices about how to take care of the natural world if you base your decisions upon falsehoods or misleading information. So, I wrote an article about the true value of clearcuts.

 

I originally sent it to major conservation organizations, thinking they would surely want people to know the truth. Not a one would publish it. Tellingly, the editor of  a national birding organization's magazine phoned to admit I was right, but this group believed it would lose members if my article appeared in their publication. The realization that environmental organizations were required by their members’ beliefs (wrong as they might be) to kowtow to an erroneous narrative was revelatory and very disturbing to me.

 

Does any birder really want Ruffed Grouse to disappear? As of 2015, 15 states listed the Ruffed Grouse as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need, mainly because of loss of habitat. This species requires the young forest that clearcutting helps to provide, yet birders apparently would have opposed receiving this information. Why? Psychologists explain this as "herd mentality", which minimizes social harm to individuals, but poses significant risks for our environment.

 

My article got published—first, by RGS, the magazine for the Ruffed Grouse Society (hunters), followed by Michigan Forests, the magazine of the Michigan Forest Association (foresters).

 

If you love our natural world as I do, I hope you will subscribe to this blog so you can be privy to real-world truths. Mother Nature desperately needs folks willing to fight inaccurate narratives that perpetuate faulty and ruinous information.

 

NATURE ADVICE:

Despite people’s aversion to clearcuts, they essentially replicate them when they clean their gardens in fall (known horticulturally as “putting the garden to bed”). Instead, you should leave the dried plant stalks, leaves, etc., until spring because this material is used by wildlife to protect eggs, larvae, and adult organisms from harsh winter weather.