The Virtues of Doing Nothing

Puddock Hill Journal #72: Benign neglect in the walnut woods yields pleasant surprises.

It’s the season for fighting Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) in these parts. In addition to calling in a landscaping team for a couple of expensive days’ work this week, I devoted myself to hand pulling the stems from planting beds and wading into our walnut woods with the string trimmer.

One tends to take woods for granted, and we mostly did so with regard to the walnut woods for years, but with one exception. Once a year, to control invasives, we mowed everything down to the ground among the trees. Pretty quickly, all dead stuff looks the same, so I learned little about what we killed over all those years.

But last year, I decided to be more discriminating. Rather than mow everything down, I used my string trimmer to attack only invasives, mostly multiflora rose and porcelainberry, leaving the rest.

This week—a couple months after my last foray—I found that plenty of multiflora rose had returned, as well as Japanese honeysuckle (shrub and vine), some porcelainberry, and a few other bad guys. Work that I’d expected to last an hour ended up consuming half a day.

If I stopped my report there, the benign neglect of the walnut woods would sound like a failure, but what I saw instead were the beginnings of great success. I found black walnut saplings, oak, sweet gum, maple, and redbud—all native trees already present nearby. Some saplings cropped up so close together that they will compete with one another for light and water—a natural process I’m happy to see in wilder places. There were an estimated fifty new trees in all—one summer’s bounty over just half an acre of woods. These were the beneficial results of doing next to nothing.

But being a steward, I couldn’t leave it at that. I cleared around some tiny trees to reduce competition and marked them with stakes lest they get leveled by overzealous string trimming next spring. Adding in a few volunteer walnut trees I intend to move into the woods from lawn and planting beds this fall, if even half these newly marked saplings survive we will have the beginning of forest renewal.

And if I continue this practice of doing almost nothing, over time the survivors—and presumably more new trees to come—will launch a healthy understory, and I can’t emphasize enough the significance of this change. Due to heavy deer pressure (we now have a high fence around most of Puddock Hill), the woods we inherited contained neither young trees nor shrub layer. I watched several trees die without replacements over a decade.

Now, in addition to the trees, the herbaceous layer in the walnut woods has become more robust. I have reported before on a plethora of native white avens spreading across the forest floor. A considerable amount of Virginia knotweed has also come on strong, along with areas of ground-hugging Virginia creeper and native violets.

And under an American holly tree I found Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum spp.):

Had I been mowing it all down annually, some of these things may have reappeared, but the trees would have had no shot, and the essence of the forest would eventually be lost.

I can see this now clear as day in the walnut woods, but what about things we do not see? This summer has been a poor one for butterflies, moths and many other arthropods at Puddock Hill, as well as toads—our little corner of the world quietly bearing witness to the greater insect apocalypse and its consequences.

Social media is rife with well-meaning but ignorant gardeners who seem to think it’s a net positive if they fight off insects on behalf of the plants in their gardens. I find it especially discouraging to read comments on the native plant pages of Facebook expressing concern for insect damage and sharing strategies for killing what are often native arthropods. Even if the pests are not native, the solution will likely not discriminate.

I wonder what purpose these folks, interested enough to join a group on the subject, see in native plants. If they want only beauty, they can find that in many exotics. Do they understand that one of the major reasons to choose natives over others is to support the local ecology? Have they stopped to consider that doing so requires feeding native bugs on the food chain that primarily eat native plants—which they require to survive? Do they understand that native plants have evolved in turn to generally withstand munching from their fellow natives?

For backyard stewards—indeed, for all gardeners who wish for a future world anything like the one we’ve inherited—the best course of action in almost all instances is to do nothing. Mow as little as possible. Fight invasive plants selectively. Understand that pesticides, even so-called natural ones, nearly always kill beneficial as well as harmful insects, and we have none left to spare.

Yes, the backyard steward must fight invasive plants, but we should primarily let nature take its course. As it has for me in the walnut woods.

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This week I marked these native tulip tree (Liriodendron) saplings for protection in the east woods:

Native New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis) puts on a show in the wet meadow:

Native bog willowherb (Epilobium leptophyllum) flowers nearby:

A native two-spotted scoliid wasp (Scolia dubia) enjoys goldenrod flowers (Solidago spp.) in the wet meadow:

Native panicleleaf ticktrefoil (Desmodium paniculatum) flowers between the barn and the wet woods:

This great egret (Ardea alba) has been hanging around. Here it flies across the big pond:

A white great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) contradicts terms beside the big pond: