NOVEMBER 11, 2021 – Over the past week our neighborhood has been out in force raking leaves before moderate weather goes . . . south. All the rakers have transformed our local world into a live-action Norman Rockwell gallery.
In addition to the rakes, however, are godforsaken leaf blowers, prompting me to mutter on several occasions, “There outta be a law against those things.” But in the People’s Socialist States of America, one needs to be careful about wishing for such things: before long, lawnmowers would be banned, at least after the sun goes down. Before you know it, lawns would be outlawed.
Fine by me—though for the record, I’d draw the line at uprooting our planet’s future via a ban on trees.
As I joined the frenzy, rounding up our birch leaves and maple leaves and the next-door neighbor’s red oak leaves (proof positive that we already live in a socialist society), I experienced an epiphanic moment: why on earth are we so OCD about raking leaves?
From a naturalist’s perspective, raking leaves into big mounds, then bagging them and hauling them off to the local “yard-waste” repository makes as much sense as discarding fruit and vegetable peels (melons and bananas excepted), which hold 99% of the nutritional value of such foods.
Trees and most particularly in our neighborhood and many thousands like it, OUR GRASS LAWNS, draw nutrients from the soil. In nature, replenishment of those nutrients is a cyclical process. Acculturated to maintain (in the ideal) nicely manicured lawns, however, we treat fallen leaves as enemy infiltrators. Left to their own devices, they’ll grow moldy and matted and kill the grass. Thus, every fall the home-with-lawn-owner must go on the offensive to protect the modern version of pasturelands around the manor home.
This crazy ritual of ours has given ironic rise to a multi-billion-dollar industry: lawn fertilizer. Because we insist on carpeting our yards with grass and maintaining a manicured “look,” we need to remove what would become a natural layer of nutrients, namely, decaying leaves. Since we remove this natural source of nutrition, we need to replace it with an unnatural source, all to sustain an aesthetic model inherited from previous generations.
To be sure, some people have “gotten religion.” They’ve let go of their grass carpets in favor of alternative ground cover, but in many locales, it’s “Citation City” if this notion of au naturel is allowed too much latitude. Curse the neighbor who allows noxious weeds to replace unnatural carpeting!
And then there’s the neighbor who gets down to the root of the problem: trees themselves. “This tree is totally out of control,” complained one neighbor to me the other day. “Too many leaves. We might have to have it taken out so we don’t have to deal with leaves in the gutters, leaves in the flower beds, leaves all over the lawn, leaves everywhere!”
Whereupon, I thought about my tree garden up at the lake—and “leaves everywhere” . . . exactly where they belong.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
