Nature hates neat

A commentator from the U.K. says this about our landscapes: “It’s about wildness, whether we’re talking about our gardens or the wider countryside. Nature hates neat. What wildlife needs is often the scruffy patches and the bits around the edge. Across the country, we’re losing a lot of our scruffiness.”

A friend of mine (now deceased) used to line up his tomato and pole bean stakes so that when you drove by on the road, at a certain time you’d see only one stake. We accused him of using a surveyor’s transit. (I suppose now it would be a GPS device.) If you ever want to see sterility, look at a property with everything neat and pretty, everything “in its place,” flowers spaced equidistantly from each other and all old stalks and dead flower heads removed for the winter so that you see. . . bare mud, or an unbroken expanse of snow, or perfectly clean and aligned pieces of bark mulch. I know that some Calvinists in The Netherlands used to sweep their gravel walkways on Saturday in preparation of their Sabbath. There’s something wonderful about that care in my opinion, but it did not create a home for wildlife.

Wildlife heaven

I’ll prefer a lawn that’s a bit too long, with some dandelions, lots of clover, a thick multi-species hedge and maybe a woodpile. I won’t suggest that a rusting pickup truck is my idea of landscaping, but in my younger years we found most of our small-game quarries – rabbits, pheasants, etc. – on old farmsteads with decaying buildings, long grass, lilacs-gone mad and yes, some rusty trucks or old plows. Wildlife heaven.

The same goes for the edges of urban sprawl and some industrial parks. When I was a truck driver in Milwaukee, my boss and I would sometimes hurry through our routes and then head for those weedy, junk-laden properties on the south side of the city. We weren’t allowed to hunt with guns or bows so we took clubs and rocks and sometimes snare wire with us. Occasionally we got lucky and had a rabbit or two for supper. Once, I almost hit a pheasant just on the edges of General Mitchell Field. Mitchell Field, like many airports, was built on level land that at one point was a swamp. The edges – outside the fence – were still inhabited by many kinds of wildlife that were hard to find in ‘developed’ land: cityscapes, suburbs or row-cropped farm fields.

More than 10 years ago, I began an email newsletter called Just Farmers. It was, of course, for farmers, but also gardeners, and usually had a wildlife feature in each edition, too. Being a good Calvinist, I began the paper by making and forthrightly stating a Set of Principles. You can be sure that stewardship was evident in them and an encouragement to move closer to organic and regenerative ideals. I am thinking of adding this to the Set of Principles: “Be scruffy.”