Leaves and People Win in Princeton Parks

You could say this is just a photo of a local park with a lawn and a couple trees, but that would be missing the big picture. What we have here is a win-win-win-win. Now, I've always wondered why win-wins, not to mention win-win-win-wins, don't get people more excited. Anyone interested in making the world a better place knows that, given what a fix the world is in, and how busy people tend to be, if we just get one win at a time there's no way we'll ever reach our goal in time to kick back and enjoy a nice cool drink on the veranda. With all the forces conspiring to make the world a worse place, we need wins in big batches--twos, threes, as many as we can get.

So, please, show a little excitement when I point out all the wins in this photo. They all have to do with those magical things called leaves. For twelve years, I've watched those white oaks grow, each year extending their branches to offer more shade for the picnic tables beneath them. As if calibrated to the shade, birthday parties seem to grow in size and frequency each year, centered under the trees and radiating out across the park. Clustered there next to the sandbox, they are the right trees in the right place, and whoever planted them should be given an award for creating an oasis of beauty and comfort where people can come together.

But what to do with those leaves when they fall, albeit very slowly through the winter, being oaks. That's where the other wins reside, for there was a time when the town would swoop in with a big crew and a big truck, then spend most of the day blowing the leaves into a pile, muscling them into the truck, and hauling them out of town to the compost center. Nice compost, you might think, but at what expense? There's the man-hours spent, the truck to buy and maintain, the extra time to drive out of town, the export of nutrients from the park, and all the while, greenhouse gases being scattered to the winds to further trouble the earth.

A few years ago, seeing all these negative impacts on budget, park and planet, I asked the parks director if the town (okay, "municipality") could return to the old borough approach of simply mowing the leaves back into the lawn. That way, the parks department would be modeling what its environmental commission has been recommending all along, that people utilize their leaves rather than blow them to the curb.

What a joy, then, to see that this year the parks department has adopted this approach in Potts Park and elsewhere. In this photo, you can see the mulch-mowed leaves nestled between the grass blades, where they will decompose, feed the lawn, reduce runoff, and maybe even make the ground a little softer when kids fall. There's a brown tint to the lawn, but that will quickly transition back to green.

This far into the blogpost, I've lost count on how many wins this simple change in lawncare has achieved, and the tally wouldn't even include all those lower priority tasks the parks crews will now have time to do. So, grab a mower or fashion a leaf corral, and see how many wins you can gather in your own yard, and later, while sitting on the veranda, make a toast to a better world.

Woody Plants With a Farmer's Tan

A couple photos to post before fall slips entirely away:

The leaves of winged burning bush (Euonymus alatus) turn bright red in full sun, or white in full shade. This photo shows the gradation on a single bush.

Please, by the way, don't plant this species, and if you have it, consider replacing it with some less invasive colorful shrub. It can be pretty, but winged burning bush has proven highly invasive in local woodlands, outcompeting native shrubs and shading out spring wildflowers.

This maple on Aiken may have gotten a farmer's tan on the top because the lower half is shaded by the tree across the street, and thus is slower to change color.

How to Thank a Leaf

On this day of gratitude, I would like to thank leaves of all kinds for all they do, for all the CO2 they eat, and all the treats they make possible, with their patient translation of sun into sugar. As if that weren't enough, they close the summer's show by becoming candy for the eye, then fly and fall in a dance with gravity, to blanket and feed the earth upon which all depends, though we pretend otherwise. How do I thank them all, where they lay in humble anonymity, while we brag and boast and think ourselves the center of the world? And how do I thank the windblown leaves that raced along with my bicycle a week or two ago? The wind at our backs, they cheered me down the sidewalk like a tickertape parade, as if all the world were going my way.

This Fall, Corral Those Leaves

I'll never understand why the human race throws certain things away, be it leaves or a hospitable climate. The two seem far different, but it's all one needless and tragic purging, a throwing away of nature's gifts while curiously courting danger, present and future. Some of my most vivid and happy memories from childhood involve leaves. One year I took the white oak leaves in our yard and raked them into rows to make a house, then rode my tricycle through the various rooms. Some leaves we burned, perfuming the autumn air. We'd throw acorns into the embers and wait for them to pop. And there's the memory of the whole family raking leaves down the hill, a row of leaves, dancing before us in bright sunlight, growing in size, to make a big pile at the edge of the woods. With my friends, I'd run down the hill, launch myself into the pile, to be enveloped in its crisp embrace. My walk to school was essentially a nature walk, through woods, down a mix of narrow paved and unpaved roads. One maple tree had particularly bright leaves with orange, yellow and red, to pick up and take to art class.

Now I live in a larger small town, a Little Big Town (like the Dustin Hoffman movie Little Big Man), on a busy street, and though I cannot stem the odd and hazardous tradition of piling leaves in the way of cars, bicyclists and pedestrians, or the stampede of traffic spilling gases into the air, I can toss leaves into a leaf corral, in what seems to me a more sustaining and spiritual approach to the physical world. The leaf corrals are an experiment in no-work, no carbon footprint composting. This fall, the corrals' contents, decomposing passively all summer, were inspected to see the results. This particular corral--called a Wishing the Earth Well because it's a well that works in reverse, giving nutrients back to the earth--includes a central cylinder made of critter-proof hardware cloth, where food scraps can be thrown and allowed to decompose, surrounded and disguised by a donut-shaped column of leaves. Yield of this 3 foot diameter corral was one and a half big tubs of compost, and a retrieved teaspoon from the kitchen that somehow got mixed in with the food scraps. There was also an effort to grow potatoes and nasturiums, which showed some promise. A botanist, by the way, will watch a movie like Young Frankenstein and come away wondering what Gene Wilder meant when he said "Never be nasty to nasturiums." Was he speaking metaphorically, or was it just something that needed to be said?

A larger corral, six feet wide and called the OK Leaf Corral, yielded five big tubs of compost ready for incorporation into the garden beds.

Here's a closeup of the compost, soft and spongy, dark and rich. Ah, the rewards of all that non-labor and non-burning of fossil fuels.

A neighbor who tried this leaf corral approach said his leaves didn't decompose, which probably meant they were dry. I, too, noticed in midsummer some pockets of undecomposed leaves in the piles, and came up with a novel approach to improving decomposition without having to turn the pile. This root feeder, normally used for fertilizing trees, can inject water into the leaf pile while also making channels for rainwater to penetrate. A few minutes of poking around was all it took to get the interior of the pile moist, and enable the decomposition of the red oak leaves by end of summer. Moisture, along with all the decomposing fungi, bacteria and insects, also enter from the ground beneath the pile.

Here's the prettiest leaf corral, which you'll have to take my word for because it's completely disguised by a dogwood tree. In other words, leaf corrals can blend into the yard, disguised by foliage while they quietly work their decomposing magic. A nice surprise last fall and winter was how the leaves would quickly settle in the corrals, after just a few days, allowing more leaves to be added as the trees slowly let them go. A leaf corral performs, then, as a bottomless receptacle for leaves.

In its simplest form, a leaf corral is made of green wire fencing, 3-4 feet high, with a couple stakes to hold it in place. Some folks in town have asked me to make leaf corrals for them, which I'm happy to do at cost, along with a donation to our Friends of Herrontown Woods.

The OK Leaf Corral

One way to wrap up the year and leave 2015 behind, as we ride December off into the sunset, is with a cowboy-tinged leaf rap -- an advertisement for the latest
in our ever-expanding line of sustainability products. 

Yee haw!

The OK Leaf Corral

By Stephen Hiltner

Is your lawn

Gone,

Beneath a sea of leaves?

Is there brown on the ground

That you don’t want around?

Well, resist that urge

To purge the surge.

Them leaves that’s fallin’

Have a higher callin’

Than to fill up the streets

And leave traffic stallin’.

So when you’re feelin’ inundated

And your yard looks second rated,

It’s good to know

That you have a pal

In our OK brand 

Of leaf corral.

Our OK brand 

of leaf corral 

is guaranteed 

to be 

watershed-safe. 

It’s the solution 

to pollution!

No curbside muss or fuss, now. 

No piles in the aisles. 

No cars swervin', 

or curvin' 

'round foliage undeservin' 

of a fate so unnervin'. 

‘Cause our sophisticated 

leaf-sensin' fencin' 

will keep your leafy fleet 

in a discreet 

corner 

of the yard. 

The OK Leaf Corral 

is a leaf corral 

you can trust, 

not to rust. 

So keep that leaf, 

(at your feet) 

out of the street! 

Just saddle on up 

in your “green” blue jeans, 

and start cleanin' the scene.

You can mow ‘em,

You can stow ‘em,

You can rake ‘em,

You can shake ‘em,

You can make ‘em into soil.

It don’t take any toil.

Don’t burn,

Don’t burn,

Don’t burn any oil.

All you gotta do is toss em’.

Oh, those leaves 

are simply awesome!

Just rake ‘em on up,

And tow ‘em on down.

Move 'em on back 

To the back of the yard.

To the back of the yard?

To the back of the yard!

Ride herd on them there leaves! 

Giddyap and get 'em on back 

To the OK Leaf Corral. 

Yee haw!

Some Local Parks "Leave the Leaves"

According to a report by councilman Patrick Simon at the December Princeton Environmental Commission meeting, the town recreation department (Princeton has no parks department) is changing its management to "leave the leaves" in 8 of 15 parks in town. That means that leaves will be mulch-mowed back into the turf on non-sports fields, and left in back areas under trees. This represents an important step away from the notion that leaves are litter that must be exported from town, and a step towards acknowledging the important ecological role leaves have in the landscape, for nutrient recycling and as habitat that benefits birds and insects like fireflies.

After mulch mowing (most any mower blade will cut leaves into bits as it cuts the grass, and therefore "mulch mow"), the park looks like this.

The decision follows a number of emails I sent to director of recreation, Ben Stentz, requesting that the maintenance crews shift away from the noisy and labor- and fuel-intensive practice of blowing leaves into piles and then hauling them out of town to the composting site.

Because of this new approach, neighbors will no longer need to listen to a morning's worth of leaf blowing each year, rec staff will have more time for other work, and there will be less burning of carbon-based fuels to export nutrients from town parks. This is what they call a win-win-win-win.

The photo shows how the mowed bits of leaves nestle inbetween the leaf blades, and will begin to behave as slow-release fertilizer for the lawn.

In my emails to staff and council members, I had also requested permission to build and fill leaf corrals in a couple local parks, to demonstrate to park users this sustainable and easy approach that, like mulch mowing, helps homeowners "leave the leaves" on their property.

That proposal was not approved, so I'm using my front yard on North Harrison Street to demonstrate the benefits of leaf corrals. As the three leaf corrals of various sizes in the front yard show, they can be proudly displayed out in the open, integrated into perennial borders, or hidden behind shrubs. As the post at this link shows, leaf corrals can be used either to generate high quality compost for the homeowner, or to simply channel nutrients back into the yard.

A "Wishing (the Earth) Well"

One approach to backyard composting is a modified version of a leaf corral that I've been demonstrating in our front yard on busy Harrison Street. The full meaning of the sign in the photo may be lost to some passersby, who may see only "wishing well" out of the corner of their eye. A leaf corral is a way of wishing the earth well. Add a leaf, and make a wish.

Though it has a well's characteristic shape, it works in the opposite direction. Rather than being an ongoing source of cool fresh water from the giving earth,  the Wishing (the Earth) Well channels nutrients back into the soil from which they came.

This is a dream come true, not only for urban soils and the nearby trees, but also for the homeowner who needs an ongoing place to put leaves and yard clippings, because the leaf corral is a bottomless container. The leaves quickly settle, decompose, and disappear back into the ground, steadily making room for more. Settling makes more room within a week; decomposing happens over the course of one summer. We might even call it "Bottom's Dream", after Nick Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream, because it is a dream that "hath no Bottom".

The first Wishing the Earth Well went next to the sidewalk, because otherwise the only visible leaf management behavior people see in town is the piling of leaves in the street, where they become a nuisance. A friend pointed to all the leaves on the lawn around it, and wasn't very convinced it could hold them all. Good point, so I integrated another corral, 6 feet across rather than 3, into the landscaping elsewhere in the front yard,

and that provided more than enough capacity for all the leaves our two big oaks, elm and silver maple generated this year. Installing it even served as a prompt to finally get some flower bulbs into the ground, which otherwise might have sat on the back porch all winter, unplanted.

With capacity to spare, I ended up adding the leaves that had fallen along the curb. Having a leaf corral as a clear destination for leaves serves as added motivation to clean them up from the yard.

Here you can see how differently the various kinds of leaves behave. The whitish leaves from the silver maple, and an elm leaf in the lower right corner of the photo, begin decomposing before they're even raked up. If those quick-decomposing leaves are put in the street and not picked up for a week or two, they'll start start rotting, releasing nutrients that then get swept down stormdrains in the next rain, polluting waterways. The oak leaves are more resistant to decay, but in a leaf corral even they turn into rich compost in less than a year if they are moist.

I have two designs thus far. One is a regular leaf corral, with a couple stakes and a length of 3 or 4 foot high green fencing wrapped in a circle. The fencing is nearly invisible in the garden, so blends very well.

The other is something of an innovation that serves a dual purpose. To the regular leaf corral is added a central cylinder made of critter-proof hardware cloth. Into the central cylinder go vegetable scraps from the kitchen. Leaves go in the rest of the corral, so the foodscraps are completely hidden by the surrounding leaves.

A friend walking by happened to have a banana peel, and contributed it to the central food scrap column. A hubcap looks unexpectedly classy and sun-disk-like as a lid. A sundial of the right size would make a good lid, too, and speaks to the potential for leaf corrals to become sculptural elements in the urban landscape. The 20 pounds of leaf compost in the flower pot there were harvested from another leaf corral filled in spring and left untended until this fall. No turning necessary.

In Princeton, the widespread use of leaf corrals could have major positive implications for our ability to fund acquisition and maintenance of open space preserves. The town spends an estimated $800,000 each year to pick up loose leaves and brush from the streets. Some of that money may be coming from Princeton's open space funding (more on this later). We need to show that leaves can easily be accommodated in the yard, at no cost to the municipality.

Leaf corrals can be easily hidden in a backyard corner, but if integrated into the front yard landscaping, they show neighbors and the community that leaves should be treated as a gift to our yards, and not something to be hauled away.

Some tips for using the Wishing (the Earth) Well:

• Leaves decompose best if the leaves are moist. Either load them in while they are wet, or poke holes through the settled leaves with a narrow rod so rainwater can penetrate. 
• Tree roots will invade from the bottom if the leaf corral is never emptied, which is fine, but if you want to use the compost elsewhere, remove the fencing some day in the fall, rake away the layer of leaves and shovel out the rich inner core of compost created over the summer. Put the fencing back in place and the corral is ready for a new fall harvest of leaves.
• The outer ring of leaves will keep reducing in size. This is good--it shows that the leaves are decomposing--but it also means the inner column of foodwaste will become exposed if one doesn't keep adding leaves or garden clippings to the outer ring. 
• Late one summer, a cantaloupe began growing inside the leaf corral from a seed in the food scraps. It developed an edible melon before first frost--a nice bonus.

The Not So Scary Leaf Pile

For some reason, a pile of leaves can trigger fear in people. There are all sorts of scary rumors about what happens when you make a pile of leaves. Might the leaves attract rats, or catch fire from the heat of decomposition, or cut off oxygen and water to the ground underneath and thereby harm nearby trees? My experience provides these answers: no, no, and no. Then there are scary stories about what a leaf pile won't do. My radio alarm woke me up one weekend morning to a segment of You Bet Your Garden, the entertaining and informative gardening program out of Philadelphia. There was our normally spot-on Mike McGrath warning listeners that a pile of unshredded leaves will not decompose nor reduce in size. Come on, Mike. Just because shredded leaves are a handy item in the yard doesn't mean whole leaves are not.

Still, a scientific background will train your mind not to take any knowledge fully for granted, so I decided to put whole leaves to the test. This past spring, I "corralled" some wet, red oak leaves left over from winter in a circular corral made of green garden fencing. By early August, the pile was 2/3rds its original size.

By October, they had settled to a third the original bulk, and it was time to check inside the pile to see what sort of decomposition had taken place, and also to check what the soil and tree roots looked like underneath the pile.

On the outside, the leaves didn't appear to have decomposed, but that proved to be just a facade disguising the transformation the pile had undergone inside. Peeling away the outer layer of leaves revealed a core of rich, moist compost--enough to fill a large plant pot.

A three foot diameter leaf corral produced twenty pounds of compost, without any effort expended beyond tossing the original filling of the leaf corral this past spring. I may have tossed a shovel full of dirt on the leaves, to "seed" the pile with the micro flora and fauna that do the decomposing, but those would have migrated upward from underneath the pile anyway. There was no mixing of the leaves--the pile did all the transformative work on its own.

And did the pile of leaves, originally three feet high, cut off water and air to the soil underneath? The soil underneath the pile was moist and thick with tree roots. The leaf pile was not killing trees but instead feeding them. Just as the decompositional flora and fauna migrate upward into the pile from the soil underneath, groundwater will "wick" upwards in the soil to keep the underside of a leaf pile moist.

Red oak leaves are some of the more decay-resistant leaves homeowners encounter, and yet they broke down in an untended pile in less than a year. It may have helped that they were wet when they were made into a pile, so the next experiment may be to fill a leaf corral with dry leaves, and see what happens. Hypothesis: Rain, snow, and soil moisture will seep into the pile from above and below, and the pile will decompose in a way that is beneficial to all living things around it.

A leaf pile like this is about as sustainable as you can get. Instead of piling leaves in the street, where they must then be trucked to a composting site, ground, mixed in windrows, turned, screened, re-piled, then carted back into town, with fossil fuel burned for every step, make a pile in your own yard and let nature do all the work. And to model good behavior for your neighbors, integrate a leaf corral into your front yard landscaping rather than hide it in the back.

Make use of the resulting compost, or leave it all for the trees to feast on, so that the leaf corral becomes a bottomless channel for transitioning leaves back into soil. If enough people do this, government expense will go down, and the quality and permeability of urban soils will go up.

Ode To Willow Oak Leaves

Recently, walking through a pleasant blizzard of falling willow oak leaves on Franklin Avenue, I remembered an ode to willow oak leaves I had written in the fateful fall of 2000 while living in Durham, part of North Carolina's Research Triangle. It was this time of year, in a city whose streets were and still are lined with willow oaks, and the enormous specimen in our yard was laying down a fresh layer of soft, attractive mulch.

We had long since given up trying to grow lawn in deeply shaded piedmont clay, in favor of letting pine needles and willow oak leaves fall where they may. The pines down there are loblolly and shortleaf. Unlike the more northern white pine planted in Princeton, they are "self-pruning", meaning they drop their lower limbs to eventually become a vaulted canopy, creating an expansive, protected, cathedral-like space beneath, through which leaves and needles make their long, idiosyncratic descents to earth in the filtered light.

The piece below was published on the editorial page of the Raleigh News and Observer as one of their periodic pastoral pieces, almost certainly completely overlooked in the tumult following the Bush-Gore election that had taken place the day before.



The Work of an Autumn Breeze

The narrow leaves of willow oak spin earthwards, catching flashes of morning light. In walks along the treelined canyons of city streets, we are all victors in a ticker tape parade. The sun's rays, having lost their summer harshness, now angle into the sheltered air beneath trees, illuminating the languid descent of leaves from vaulted canopy.

Not all leaves are so elegant. Pine needles plunge earthward like clouds of arrows. The broader leaves of maples fall in rocking zig-zags. But willow oak leaves are so designed to celebrate their momentary freedom in one long graceful pirouette. They spend summer clustered overhead, anonymous in dense masses of green. Then, made expendible by autumn's chill, refined of all colors but gold, they become a million individualists in their first and last dance back to earth. In loose embrace with gravity they fall, each spinning in its own manner, at its own tempo, each captured by the sun's beaming light for all time and but for a moment.

The young girl next door tries to catch one, and quickly discovers how illusive they are--so tangible in their approach, yet like phantoms unwilling to have their only dance cut short. Having reached the ground, again anonymously massed, they mingle and merge and return by degrees to the soil from which they came.

At such times, it is hard to think of leaves as anything but a gift. In the competition between lawn and leaf for my heart, lawn has had to yield. I used to pick up the sticks, and rake the leaves, and mow threadworn grass. But now I channel my yard's sylvan tendencies rather than struggle against them. The leaves fall where they do for a reason: to soften the soil, to catch the rain, to help dogwoods through the droughts and give kids one more reason for delight. What pleasure to trace a leaf's whimsical flight, and find at bottom a sense of rightness and rest, rather than impending chore. The Triangle is a forest masquerading as metropolis, and we are the beneficiaries of its golden rain.

Durham, NC, Fall, 2000

Integrating Leaves Into the Landscape

There, can't you see it, the massive pile of leaves? One of my cause celebres, in case it wasn't obvious from all the previous leaf-related posts, is to get people to keep their leaves in their yards. Nutrients, reduced runoff, habitat, less dependence on municipal services--what's not to like? Obviously something, since so many people dump their leaves in the street regardless of yard size.

This residence, located out towards Terhune Orchards at the intersection with Cold Soil Road, shows how leaves can easily be integrated into a neatly maintained yard.

Rather than blow the leaves out to where they'll be a hazard next to the road, the owners have a nice cluster of trees halfway between road and house where they pile the leaves. Despite the adding of leaves to the same pile year after year, the pile won't get very high due to decomposition and raiding of nutrients by the tree roots. And anytime the owners want rich compost for the garden, they need only dig into the interior of this pile to find it waiting.

A Visit From the Claw

A Visit From The Claw

'Twas the month before Christmas, when all through the town,

The streets were chocked full of great mounds of brown--

Yardwaste and tree limbs, dumped without care,

In hopes that the street crew soon would be there.

The kids, how they wished they could jump in a pile

Of leaves dry and crisp, where they'd linger awhile.

But all dreams were dashed! Their dad called a halt

To such thoughts of venturing near the asphalt.

The streets had become so exceedingly narrow,

That bicyclists mixed with the cars at their peril.

The street drains were clogged, the rains made a river.

I watched this insane spectacle with a shiver.

When just down the way there arose such a clatter.

I sprang to the door to see what was the matter.

From round the next corner at once there appeared

A caravan that was demonstrably weird.

With dump truck and pickup and street crew I saw

A giant contraption with grappling claw

That groaned as it scooped up the leaves in great gobs.

One thing that was clear was they wouldn't lose their jobs.

For no sooner did they the street cleaner make,

Than neighbors dumped even more leaves in their wake.

The mounds they grew higher than ever before.

I guessed that our town had gone nuts at the core.

How could such a state of affairs come to pass?

What sense underlies this self-made morass?

Is decomposition a thing to be purged

From yards prim and proper that so blandly merge?

The leaves, they have value, it's clear, don't you see?

To earthworms and robins and flowers and trees.

Let's make room between the back fenceline and shrubs,

And there place the leaves as good food for the grubs.

Hidden from view they will quietly mellow.

As Jefferson did at beloved Monticello.

To ground they return; no need for more work.

As they flatten and fade, no varmints will lurk.

Let humus and nutrients there feed your soil.

The mulch will kill weeds, and save you some toil.

The leaf-softened ground will soak up the rain

And lessen the floods that now seem to gain.

Or, grind up the leaves as you last mow the grass.

Okay, so it might take just one extra pass.

But saved be our streets from a public display

Of all that in nature is meant to decay.

I know that I'm fighting a dominant force,

That flouts local law as a matter of course.

No bureaucrat dares to deliver a fine,

Risking taxpayer wrath of a virulent kind.

But speak up I must, and speak up I will

As long as the streets continue to fill.

This dumping is wrong. It's an ongoing blight.

To all who love sense: Let's fight the good fight!

Background: Yesterday, a man overheard me talking to a friend at the Arts Council about all the leaves clogging the streets. He came over and said that West Windsor has the same problem, and that their town council had just thrown its hands up in exasperation, for lack of a solution to the annual deluge of leaves. The thought of towns all over New Jersey struggling with the same intractable problem, mixed perhaps with the flush of vitamins from eating swiss chard from the backyard garden, had the unexpected effect of later moving me to verse, which I read yesterday night at the Princeton borough council meeting. When faced with adversity, write a poem. By coincidence, The Claw came by our house as I was writing it. My apologies to Clement Clarke Moore for rerouting his 1822 "A Visit From St. Nicholas" down a very messy street.

The Annual Purging of Leaves

One of this blog's "pages" (listed in the right column as Leaves) contains my annual letter to the editor calling for clean streets and backyard composting, and each year the dumping of leaves, dirt, grassclippings, branches and garden trimmings on the pavement becomes more emphatic and non-stop. The power of the pen is overrated.

What does a tidy yard gain the homeowner if the street in front of it is clogged with debris? It's as if we've disowned the public space. Dumping on the streets has become a year-round, essentially unregulated activity.

True, the leaves, etc. eventually end up getting composted outside of town, but collecting leaves is a highly mechanized, gas-gulping process that makes municipal workers unavailable for other tasks.

And leaves the streets strewn with organic debris that then adds a nutrient load to local waterways.

Streets function essentially as ephemeral creeks, connected directly to local streams, so that the dumping of organic matter in the streets is akin to dumping directly into a waterway--an urge society was supposed to have cured itself of decades ago.

There was a time when leaves were appreciated, not only for their rich fertilizer value but for their beauty and the joy a pile of dry, crisp leaves can bring to kids.

Many homeowners have abundant space in back, yet make a point of raking all leaves to the street. Seeking to comprehend, I came up with two new possible reasons this year: 1) the frenetic pace of life has caused people to reject the relatively slow pace of decomposition, and 2) since homeowners often take their cues from neighbors, the highly visible practice of dumping leaves on the streets is more readily imitated than the comparatively hidden practice of piling leaves in a corner of the backyard.

Creating "Rooms" in Your Yard For Leaves

One of the perennials that keeps growing in my mind is puzzlement over why people dump leaves on the street each fall. All that good fertilizer and organic matter piled on the asphalt, as incongruous as a beached whale! One contributing factor I've hit upon is that most yards lack "rooms." If the yard can be considered an outdoor extension of the indoor living space, it makes sense to divide it up like we divide up our indoor space--into compartments each with a different purpose.

The typical yard has shrubs pushed against the house and fenceline, defining only one sprawling "room" that extends uninterrupted to the curb, all of which is then required to be ornamental.

If, instead, we use shrubs or wooden walls to define and obscure small utility areas in our yards, it becomes very easy to store leaves while they decompose and slowly return to the soil from which they came. Nature's miraculous trash-free economy is then allowed to function, and we're spared a big mess in the streets and the considerable municipal cost of hauling, grinding and mechanically turning leaves at a distant composting center.

The photo shows one such configuration in a friend's backyard. Another version, using shrubs to define the space, is shown two posts prior to this one, below.

The Annual Leaf Quandary

This time of year, Princeton, like all towns, exhibits two philosophies of yard maintenance that are diametrically opposed. One governing philosophy sees fallen leaves as a valuable resource to be composted or used as mulch and slow-release fertilizer. The other philosophy views leaves as useless and annoying litter that must be banished from the yard.

A 10/15 New Yorker magazine article entitled "Blowback: The Suburban Leaf War" describes the point of view that lawns "enhance your property by extending your living space and by advertising your ability to bring nature to heel." A clean yard and close trimming of shrubs exemplifies this view.

Scenes such as this, then, replicated all over town, can be seen as a victory for a community shrugging off nature's assaults on imposed order.

Dumping leaves in the street, though, has many negative impacts, including making the streets messy and more dangerous. Private purification becomes public hazard.

There is a way that residents could have clean lawns AND clean streets, simply by changing the location of a few shrubs. Typical landscaping puts shrubs up against the house and along the fenceline.

But these two photos show an easy way to accommodate a pile of leaves in the yard by planting shrubs around an area designated for the leaf pile. The shrubs serve both as a visual screen and as a way to contain the leaves.

Here's the view from the street. Privet isn't my favorite shrub. Something like Itea virginica or Ilex glabra would work as a native substitute, but the main idea is to reconfigure how shrubs of any kind are planted in the yard, so as to create refuges for leaf piles that will quickly be flattened down by the weight of snow and benefit shrubs and trees through the steady process of decomposition.

Not all leaves need be handled the same way. Here, pine needles and honey locust leaves are so small they can be simply mowed over or raked underneath shrubs to serve as a mulch. Leaves of silver or red maple also tend to "melt" back into the lawn, decomposing quickly. I believe the county extension agents these days recommend simply mowing over leaves and letting them filter back into the turf.

Many leaf blowers come with a bag and a reverse setting that allows them to vacuum up leaves and grind them, making an excellent mulch for around shrubs.