“The days of automatically cutting down dead perennial growth in the autumn are long gone. Most gardeners and those involved in plant management are now familiar with the idea that seedheads feed birds and may harbor a variety of invertebrates too. The idea that a city can be a habitat is widely accepted in the industrialized world.”
–Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury, from Planting: A New Perspective
“A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all, it teaches entire trust.”
–Gertrude Jekyll, from The Gardening Companion: A Guide to the Art of Garden Design
Gold Mouths Cry
Gold mouths cry with the green young
certainty of the bronze boy
remembering a thousand autumns
and how a hundred thousand leaves
came sliding down his shoulder blades
persuaded by his bronze heroic reason.
We ignore the coming doom of gold
and we are glad in this bright metal season.
Even the dead laugh among the goldenrod.
The bronze boy stands knee-deep in centuries, and never grieves, remembering a thousand autumns, with sunlight of a thousand years upon his lips and his eyes gone blind with leaves.
–Sylvia Plath
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Leaving Seedheads
Leaving seedheads in your garden over the winter provides an excellent food source for birds and animals. To summon the wisdom of Piet Oudolf, creator of the native garden at the Highline in New York City, the days of cutting your plants to the ground in autumn are over. While old garden books used to exhort us to leave no dry stalk standing lest it harbor an over-wintering insect, we’ve come to realize that the over-wintering insects are a crucial part of a delicate eco-system. If you simply can’t stand to have a “messy” garden over the winter, you can cut the stalks, lay them flat, and leave them in the garden–they’ll be snow-covered soon enough. The creatures who spend the winter outdoors will make use of them.