The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Don’t be in a hurry to clean up dead leaves
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Most of us are probably familiar with this old adage. It’s an interesting, age-old piece of advice. But is it true? When I look around at (what many view as) God’s creation — this amazing planet of ours, plus all of the creatures on it — it looks like a mess to me!
When I walk in the woods, I see old, broken trees lying scattered like matchsticks on the forest floor along with years and years of fallen leaves. There are empty shells and dead seaweed washed up on beaches. There’s plenty of decaying stuff littering ocean beds and lake bottoms as well; it’s just where we can’t see it. And there’s dust everywhere.
It’s not just “nature.” Human beings are messy, too. There’s the obvious of (ahem) bodily eliminations, and the roughly 25100 hairs we shed every day, but there’s more that we don’t ever see. For example, it’s estimated that over the course of a lifetime, the average person will shed over seventy-five pounds of skin cells.
The idea that being clean will stand us next to God doesn’t actually come from the Bible. Possibly emerging out of the ancient Jewish laws about cleanliness as it relates to food, the words in their familiar format were uttered by English theologian John Wesley, in a 1778 sermon.
But — is cleanliness next to godliness? Are we really supposed to be going around picking up after God? If we look at it from a natural life-cycle standpoint, I suggest that the answer is clearly “no.” In fact, when we try to clean up, we may actually be doing harm.
My musing about this began with a timely post I came across on Facebook last week. It read:
“Please resist the urge to clean up your gardens until after the temperatures are constantly above 50 degrees. Many butterflies, bees, and other pollinators are currently overwintering in the dead leaves and hollowed-out stems of last year’s plants. If you clean out your garden now, you will literally be throwing away this year’s butterflies, bees, and other beneficial pollinators.”
For some specifics to share with you on why we should leave things alone until the weather warms up, I turned to “Nature’s Best Hope,” by Doug Tallamy. (I’ve informally designated this as my 2020 “Book of the Year.”) Many of us gardeners have been turning our attention to supporting bees and butterflies by planting “pollinator-friendly” flowers and shrubs. In his book, Tallamy
says, essentially, that this is great, but we need to “complete the life cycle.”
Says Tallamy, “…for most caterpillar species, only…the egg and larval stages are completed on the host plant. Most caterpillars crawl off their host plant before molting to their pupal stage.” (I’ve personally witnessed this many times, as caterpillars I’ve been observing suddenly go missing just as they’ve reached their full size.)
Tallamy references his research on caterpillar species that use oak trees as their host plant. A few of the 511 species spin their cocoon on the host tree itself. But 480 species “fall to the ground when the caterpillar is fully grown, where they either burrow into the soil to pupate underground or spin a cocoon in the leaf litter under the tree. Groundcovers planted under trees, such as native pachysandra, woodland phlox, foamflower, ginger, or native shrubs, make perfect sites for moths to complete their development safely.”
There are two things to note here. One, leaf “litter” may be home to the very moths and butterflies you’re trying to sustain, so give the adults time to emerge before your spruce up your yard. Two, native groundcovers under trees, rather than grass, and letting leaves lie will help these species.
It sounds paradoxical, but when it comes to nature, often the best thing to do is to do nothing.
Note: In this column, I mean no offense to anyone’s religious beliefs.