My apologies to all you neat gardeners out there, but I am slowly warming to the pledge to be a lazy gardener.
There's several reasons for my conversion, not the least of which is I am getting older. I don't seem to have the energy I used to have to pull weeds and keep every faded flower deadheaded. Sometimes plants get overgrown (think the mint family), spread like wildfire, and start crowding out other plants. Other times they get so tall that they fall over and start growing over the ground instead of up into the air. As long as they look half way decent, I let them be.
It's OK that I will never win a garden club award for order, neatness and exquisite design. Secretly I relish this rebellious attitude because I have a more important objective in mind.
What looks like swaths of green chaos at times is in fact my effort to attract more wildlife, including birds, bees, butterflies and a variety of mammals like foxes, red squirrels, and chipmunks.
Organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology encourage gardeners to be a bit lazy, especially in the fall, to promote a more diverse and healthy environment for wildlife.
You can be lazy and still leave the impression that your garden is intentionally well cared for. Visual cues include using a variety of hardscape materials, well-spaced native perennials that will eventually fill in but not crowd an area, a mix of woody and herbaceous plants and planting high and low. All are indicators of purposeful management that can be beneficial to wildlife and yet have a casual feel.
At our house, about a third of our six acres is woodlands. We've done very little to change what goes on there other than to blaze some trails. I purposely leave dead snag trees in the woods, too, for whomever wants to live in them, including owls, pileated woodpeckers, squirrels, and raccoons.
Our hillside comprises another acre of mixed woods and fields, making the habitat great for edge dwellers like songbirds. We mow that area only a few times a year mainly because of ticks, otherwise we would probably have more birds like turkeys and maybe even a pheasant or two.
Another two acres is lawn, which is boring to me if it were not for all the "weeds" that are in many cases beautiful wildflowers.
It is as if the Master took a shaker and sprinkled every weed he could think of on to our lawn. I love it and I try to let dense patches of "weeds" grow as long as I can in the spring and early summer.
Lazy mowing helps the bees and other pollinators who are struggling to survive in what is otherwise a sterile environment. It's an efficient way for them to expend minimal energy while they forage from one large flower patch to another.
And then there are some of the not so formal gardens surrounding the house and outbuildings. When fall comes, these areas can sometimes become a bone of contention between me and my better half. He wants things neat and tidy.
I want things as lazy and messy as possible.
I let the purple coneflower heads stay standing and go to seed because goldfinches love them. They look terrible with their brown, prickly heads but what a feast for the finches!