October | 2025 | Kingsview & Co

I have had interesting conversations for decades with friends whose philosophies of lawns are much more proactive than mine. I love our lawn at the edge of woods–but I love it best as a kind of tame version of a meadow in a national forest, left to be as wild as possible while still being sort of recognizably lawn-ish.

Of course laissez-faire on behalf of loving God’s earth and creatures by turning lawn deserts into something better can also be interpreted as lack of oomph for lawn care. Hence I will confess to some gratitude that even the part of my vision motivated by laziness seems increasingly and conveniently to be supported by the research. I was particularly tickled to see this support for not even mulching our leaves this year.

This suggests that the leaves at the edge of the lawn, under the white pine, do not, after all, represent chores still to be completed this autumn. Rather, the work—nurturing and celebrating life!—is already in process.

I had thought that what I’ve long done, mulching leaves and mowing outward concentric in circles to blow them to forested fringes–after implementing no-mow May, extending periods between mowing, and never never never treating the lawn chemically–captured main steps for managing autumn leaves to nurture instead of destroy or evict life. But in her New York Times article, Margaret Roach proposes that even then I wasn’t going far enough, noting in her exploration of lawn studies how life fares in lawns cared for too well, so to speak:

Rake up or blow away those leaves, or shred them with your mower, and the results plummet — as do the essential ecological services those organisms perform, including key pest-control roles by the spiders, parasitic wasps and certain beetles.

Even composting, which certainly seems preferable to bagging leaves for landfills, has its drawbacks, given that “a well-managed compost pile achieves temperatures that will kill some organisms beneficial to your yard, Dr. Ferlauto said.”

As Roach reports,

“We actually have a lot more things emerging than I think many homeowners think we do,” Dr. Ferlauto said. “In a square meter of yard where you leave your leaves, there’s on average almost 2,000 insects that will emerge over the course of the spring.”

By my very very rough calculations, this means that in the fringes I’ve mowed so we can get to our compost pile without walking into snakes, I’ve actually probably destroyed 40,000 or so insects. And God knows how many I’ll save through my new plan not to do more messing with these messy but now so representative-of-life leaves. From laziness to life supporter. I’ll take it.