People complain about leaves. They’ll complain in an aggrieved but nevertheless indulgent tone about their own leaves but the more acidic comments refer to someone else’s leaves. Someone nearby, with the audacity to have a healthy deciduous tree sequestering carbon and mitigating the local heat effect that nevertheless goes and drops its leaves and not just on the their own property but on theirs. Like the trees are littering or something.
That’s the sort of derangement that comes with the notion of personal property rights.
We’ve had people take trees down for no greater offense than that: they have leaves. And botanical audacity. They’re freaking socialists is what they are. Or, like the neighbor across the street, they take down two large healthy conifers because they were near the house and might fall on it some day. Maybe in a couple hundred years. Dude. It’s about as likely as your roof caving in from a blue-ice shit-bomb from a passing airplane. The trees are a hundred feet tall. If your neighbor three doors down had one you’d be just as vulnerable. No matter: dude got himself a nice tidy treeless front yard and left one more modest tree, which promptly keeled over roots and all in the next windstorm, taking out his neighbor’s power in midwinter, because it had lost the anchor of the big trees’ roots.
I’m not a chore hound. Lots of things need to be done that aren’t fun to do. But I always liked raking. I liked the mild exercise, the fragrance, the soft whuffing of the bamboo rake, the emerging lawn, combed and coiffed.
I raked a lot when I was growing up. We had maples. The neighbor girl and I used to rake them into blueprints and then walk in and out of the rooms, playing house, and later rake them into big piles and jump in them. There’s nothing like jumping into a big pile of leaves! You kind of remember how cool it was when you’re about twenty, and you see a big pile of leaves and try it one more time, possibly under the influence of peers and alcohol, trying to regain your innocent youth, especially if you think it makes you a more attractive and fun-loving person. And you discover that Gravity has a much stronger opinion about your extra hundred pounds. It’s not fun at all. But if you can come to long enough to smell that pile of leaves, it drops a hook right into your childhood, and you can reel it in.
In our yard, we raked the leaves into Dad’s compost pile, which wasn’t even a concept next door; the neighbor girl raked them toward the outdoor fireplace and someone set them on fire. Now that was a terrific smell! My new little pink lungs loved it. Pollution wasn’t on anyone’s radar back then. Even indoors the atmosphere was one-third Viceroys.
It’s been years since Dave and I had a lawn we needed to groom. Now we don’t rake, but we do sweep the walkways with a broom, sending the leaves sideways into the garden beds. That’s about it. The leaves pile up in the garden and I know for a fact that my tree-felling neighbor, who has never met a fossil-fuel-powered tool that didn’t give him a chubby, passes judgment on our garden. It’s not tidy. It’s the opposite of how he thinks a yard should look. I feel the same way about his.
My garden is hopping all winter long with birds scuffling in the leaves for hors-d’oeuvres. Pulling the last seeds off the perennials. Poking treasures into the soil to find later. Even in the middle of a city you can create a place that attracts birds that ignore the yard next door. They’re that precise. I am their landlady. I try to be one of the nice ones. I try to see what they need. I firmly believe that if you give birds what they need you’ll improve the world for us all. I do.
OMG! I love this post! We have an untidy yard also… and no lawn. And although not technically “in the city,” we are one block from its borders. We have LOTS of trees. In fact, we may be unable to have homeowners insurance in time, because they sent a person with a camera here to inspect our property, and he was concerned about all the trees so close to the house. Fuck them! We are NOT getting rid of our trees! And your neighbor? I must say that when you said he cut down 2 healthy trees, and then the smaller one got blown over in a windstorm, a part of me was gleeful. Not for the death of the tree, but because I don’t even KNOW your neighbor, but he’s an asshole.
We don’t rake leaves either. My rationalization is that no one rakes leaves in the woods, but the woods are not inundated with leaves. They break down and feed the trees and plants nutrients. We get them off our pathways, but that’s it. Paul lets them stay in the driveway. The cars, as they run over them, chop them down into manageable bits. He then spreads out a tarp at one end of the driveway, sweeps the leaves onto it, adds worms from a local park that has a vending machine for fishing worms, another tarp goes over it. By spring, it’s compost, to be added to our pile. It would be considered “unsightly” by community standards no doubt. Fortunately, we have a 6 foot high stockade fence which shields our backyard from view. We try to keep up our front yard. But what happens in our backyard, STAYS in our backyard.
And what else is in our backyard? All manner of birds, squirrels, groundhogs, skunks, opossums. We used to get frogs, but I haven’t seen or heard any this year. Neither have I seen lightning bugs, and have read that they are becoming extinct due to over-development. Just last year, we were TEAMING with them. This year, I only saw TWO. I fucking hate collateral damage.
Two additions: in Maine, they DO tidy their woods. Weird. All swept up with the granite slabs rearing up. Also? You should look up what happens when fishing worms are thrown into the woods. Shoot, I wrote about it…wonder if I can find it now…
Aha! https://www.murrbrewster.com/humor/maybe-they-get-caught-between-their-hoof-toes/
Well that explains why they’re so good at breaking down those leaves!
Ah, but pay attention to this part: “In fact, they’re damn near ruining forests wherever they find a way in. Which apparently they are doing because people toss their extra bait worms into the ditch.”
A vending machine with worms. Never heard of that before!
If they can dispense gummy bears, worms should be no problem.
It’s a local state park where they have a large pond that they stock with fish. So they also have a vending machine for different types of worms (night crawlers, red wigglers, etc.) They certainly escaped a gruesome death at the end of a hook, and instead get to live out their lives in our raised beds and compost pile.
we’re letting milkweeds take over our lawn. less to mow, with possibilities of monarchs. win win.
From what I hear, they will do a very nice job of taking over. I can’t quite pull the trigger. I don’t have a lawn, but I don’t know that I want to sacrifice any of the other stuff. Good luck on the monarchs! We don’t have a lot here. I know. I know. I should plant milkweed.
I’m a leaf gatherer, in the autumn here I sweep up all the leaves on the footpaths and by the stand of mailboxes and toss the lot onto my garden patch. The soil there is 100% useless for growing anything but my succulents, but I figure in about fifty more years of leaf additions it might improve somewhat. I still won’t be able to dig in there because of all the tree roots, but the birds love it all.
Yay river!
I recall jumping into a pile of dry leaves in my yoot and in the middle of a breath got one caught in my throat—that’ll teach me, eh? Gallows for the leaf blower folk, all of them!
yes- or the stocks, or a dunk in a river with the rest of us cheering!
I feel instantly homicidal whenever I hear a leaf blower.
A single device that can cause annoyance, hearing damage and allergy attacks — trifecta!
Don’t forget destroy the climate.
I live in an association with strict rules, so the leaves on my postage stamp lot get raked. I either mulch them or carry them back into the woods behind my house and spread them out.
I have a huge Catalpa in my front yard that I planted as a four foot sapling 2015. It’s now close to thirty feet high and shades most of the front lawn. My goal was for it to also shade the house, but not yet.
The good news about not shading the house is that the winter sun through the front windows means I don’t need to run my heaters all that much. The bad news is that the AC becomes necessary earlier and later each spring and fall.
Aw man. I just got AC this year for the very first time. I used it four days last summer, but I’m kind of an energy nazi.
More good news — no roof rats going from tree to house!
When we were young, exuberant visionaries of what our 3-acre plot could be, we started by removing a slice of the 1500 white pine trees that the previous owner had planted in soldier rows up, down, across. You could buy the seedlings back then in bundles of 50 from the Forest Service. The idea was to cover the whole property in a grid that never needed mowing.
In 1992 when we bought the place, we removed perhaps a third, making way for a house and driveway. That still left hundreds and hundreds more.
Over the years, many fell, blown over in storms, dropping huge limbs, losing their tops. Others we removed to make way for gardens and a henhouse and a greenhouse. I’m not sure how much we spent clearing them out, limbing them up, selectively removing some to make the planting look more natural. If you stand in certain places, you can still see the rows in perfect precision.
Now after 30 years, the aging mature ones have taken on Tim Burtonesque poses, some 80 feet high. Beautifully weird and scary.
The old stumps are filled with grubs. Pileated woodpeckers are turning them into mulch.
Wow! Those rigid rows would give me an attack of the opposite of OCD.
Oh, dear Murr! May I print this post out for my Tree Steward unit to use in educational events? It’s simply perfect.
Heavens! You are encouraged to share any of my posts in any way you want.
Murr: I live in Maine and nobody I know tidies their woods. Maine is 90% forested, so if we tidied our woods, we wouldn’t have time to shovel snow or cow manure.
Okay maybe it’s only my cousin. He would tidy the copse behind his cabin. It looked pristine. It’s definitely a fall activity. You wouldn’t tidy in April because you need to be on a mower at high speed to outrun the black flies.
This brought back fond memories of raking oak leaves as a kid and jumping in them. We burned them in a pile down by the street with a hose nearby in case of escapes. It was a rural area and everyone burned their leaves. Composting only happened in our back yard by mistake–when we didn’t get around to raking everything in the fall.
The smell of burning leaves makes me eight again.
We had three big oak trees in the front of our suburban residential front yard in southern New Jersey. The front “lawn” was beautiful moss — yes, a complete carpet of moss. The oak trees began to suffer from the three prevailing oak diseases that are making their rounds in New Jersey.
We did not want to spray to save the environment. So, the trees were treated systemically. Core samples of the surrounding sandy soil showed that it lacked in organic nutrients. So, we began to inject fertilizer into holes on a grid of every three feet.
One of the three oak trees died anyway and we cut it down, covered the 8-inch high stump with a plastic sheet, and built an 18″-high flower bed on top of the stump using river rocks as the surrounding enclosure.
But, sadly, the result of fertilizer spilling over and sun now shining down on the moss after the oak was cut down, despite feeding the moss with sulphur, resulted in the moss dying.
Our solution was to plant clover. It is low maintenance and is nitrogen fixing and the bees love it. It makes for a beautiful front “lawn.”
And, we still have the other two big oak trees in the front, in addition to a huge century-old spreading Scottish Oak next to our house (with a lightning rod and double cables to every large branch in case we have an ice storm), and a huge marsh oak and three red oaks in the back yard (as well as a hug tulip poplar that the tiger swallow tails love).
Needless to say, we have a “few” leaves to rake in the fall (Whew!!!). We do leave them on the “forested” border of our back yard. They are large and heavy!! But they make beautiful piles to jump in!! They all go on a huge compost pile along the back fence and have been accumulating there for the past 25 years!!! Boy, do they take long to decompose!!
One more caveat — we have two self-built ponds in the back yard. The small one has a waterfall and weepers hanging down over it. The larger one (14′ x 14′ by 4′ deep) has Mollies and Shubunkins. It is ecologically balanced without any chemicals, with floating water plants and water lilies, and the algae are controlled by the fish. The fish, frogs and plants survive all winter by our having a fountain running all winter to keep a hole open in the ice to allow for oxygen. I mention this because I have to crawl into the ponds in the late spring every year to haul out mountains of oak leaves, but still leaving the “muck” at the bottom for the plants. Boy do I look a sight when I climb out of there in my blue jean shorts!! But it’s actually fun to still play in the mud at my ripe “young” age of 87!!!
No, I’m sorry, we’re going to have to have photos. Of ALL of that. Moss to shubunkins to your shorts.