Nature and Gardening

6657 readers

1 users here now

All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.

(It's not mandatory, but we also encourage providing a description of your image(s) for accessibility purposes! See here for a more detailed explanation and advice on how best to do this.)

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

109

Trust in nature – and stop raking up your garden leaves (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Jho to c/greenspace

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Some choice quotes from the article:

[S]pent leaves that flutter to the ground aren’t a waste product. They are rich in carbon and play an essential role for the tree and the ecology it supports.

The leaves act as a physical barrier for soil, keeping it and its many microbes insulated, and also for the tree roots, as the wet mats of autumn leaves shelter the fragile top layer from the drying winds.

Many, many things live in these dead leaf layers: caterpillars of moths and butterflies, their chrysalises, beetles, centipedes, springtails, woodlice and spiders … and doesn’t the blackbird know it, rustling through the leaves?

No one loves wet autumn leaves more than earthworms, though. Sensing one of their favourite things, they start to work on incorporating them into the soil. Earthworms line their homes with autumn leaves, using them for bedding and then, because they are good housekeepers, they eat them as they break down.

Leave the leaves be: they are not a mess, a waste or a hindrance – they are life and vital with it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] flora_explora 1 points 1 year ago

Just be careful not to project too much onto nature. The layman's idea of nature is pretty heavily biased because of our assumptions (and this obviously can be very different depending on the input culture). There is a strong dualism of culture vs nature and most of our idea of nature is produced in differentiation to our culture. For example, when people see human industrial technology as evil, nature is suddenly natural, chemical-free, mother earth, in harmony, sustainable, etc. But neither technology inherently evil nor nature inherently sustainable or better. Natural systems break down all the time. I would think that for a system of limited ressources sustainability would need some sort of planning capacity?