Quiet Landscaping in Yards and Preserves

This post spent a long time in the draft folder, and surfaces now only due to an email from QuietPrinceton, an organization that successfully lobbied for a partial ban on raucous gas-powered leafblowers. They are currently seeking a year-round ban, and in the meantime offer a list of "quiet landscapers" who use electric or hand tools rather than gas-powered.

Quiet is an elusive quality in a busy town. As light pollution cheats us of the stars, sound pollution cheats us of silence. It's all unintended, of course. No one's intentionally pointing lights at the sky at night, or making noise just to bother people. Like so many things that profoundly affect our lives, noise is a biproduct--part of the collateral damage of everyday life. There's traffic noise on the streets that we expend unconscious energy to block from awareness, but the racket of mowers and leaf blowers in people's yards is impossible to ignore. A gas powered leaf blower instantly obliterates whatever peace and quiet was to be had in the neighborhood. 

That noise grows out of an attitude of suppression rather than nurturance. People are cared for by trained medical staff. Our kids are taught by knowledgeable teachers. But the landscapes around us are largely owned and tended by people who know little about nature. Nature is complex. To get to know it requires a long learning curve. Homeowners are busy, may find nature intimidating, even a little scary, and so are much relieved when a landscape crew will come each week and noisily reduce an oversized suburban yard to turf and a few trees and rounded shrubs. After the noise subsides and the dust settles, the simplicity and neatness is calming. But surely there is some alternative to this anti-nature approach to landscaping. After all, a walk in the woods, which is hardly neat and tidy, with trees dropping leaves and twigs wherever, is also said to be calming. 

Unlike most homeowners, my sister Kathy in Cleveland has always taken great interest in her yard. She has cared for her vegetables and her flower beds, and her husband mowed the minimal patch of grass. When she recently decided it was time to get some help with her beautiful garden, the challenge was finding a landscape crew knowledgeable enough to tend complex plantings.                                 

She found one, and they happened to stop by while I was visiting

The sort of work needed to tend a garden with almost no lawn--weeding, deadheading--is refreshingly quiet. 

The body language of nurturance is strikingly different from those "mow, blow, and go" brigades stalking a yard with their noisy weaponry of suppression. This crew knows the difference between a weed and an intended plant.

Even when tending to 150 acres of Princeton open space at Herrontown Woods, we find quiet tools so much more satisfying to use. Loppers, mostly, with an electric weedwhacker or hedgetrimmer occasionally coming out of the shed. In a world where one conflict begets another, it is calming to quietly tend to nature, each day getting to know and value its complexity.

Here are notes from some shop talk with the crew leader in Cleveland: He uses Tordon for stump treatments, and Finalsan--a low-toxicity spray for weeds.