Not an extreme gardener? Try passive landscaping

All summer long I pretend I’m in charge of my lawn. “Lawn” is a euphemism for the cleared area around my house where I try to stop birch and spruce saplings, meadowsweet, milkweed and goldenrod from engulfing everything. And where I succeed, that’s where grass grows. At least, it grows on the parts where moss, ledges and anthills don’t.

I do not like yard work. Reeser Manley or Janine Pineo, I am not. In a dozen years here in Troy I have planted one lilac bush, which is small but doing OK, and a few perennial herbs and flowers by the deck. Actually my wife, Bonnie, planted them. Instead, my strategy for keeping the cleared area 1. reasonably neat-looking and 2. too short for mosquito housing, involves what I call passive landscaping.

In passive landscaping, you do not plant or dig anything. Instead, wherever you want something sticking up, you let whatever wants to, grow. The main gardening tool is the lawn mower.

In the early years I used a chain saw, too. It’s unbelievable how fast birch saplings spring up in a clearing. I slew hundreds of them along the imaginary boundary with the big trees where I wanted the yard to be.

After the woody stuff is contained, the lawn mower does a pretty good job of keeping the trees at a distance. If you’re diligent, that is. If you’re not, the woods encroach. They don’t like the clearing and inch toward the house at night like some Maine version of Tolkien’s Old Forest.

To adorn the cleared area, I left a small willow, an ash, oak and alder, some spruces, wild rose bushes and two clumps of staghorn sumac. The sumac is sneaky. It sends up shoots in distant, unlikely spots. But the lawn mower stops it from generating a boreal jungle.

On the ledgy slope behind the house, wild carrot and goldenrod co-habitate with the grass near a gray birch, a poplar and a dogwood I let stand. The wild carrot smells good when you mow it, sweet and woody. Lower down I combat raspberry thickets. And early on, there are dandelions.

The truth is, I like dandelions. They’re happy bursts of yellow light, like little suns. In fields they blossom tall and gaudy. On an actual lawn they grow to 5 or 6 inches.

The trouble is, I don’t want them to take over the “lawn.” It’s patchy enough already, and ragged-looking dandelion greens disrupt guideline No. 1 concerning neatness. So I try to keep the raggedness in check by decapitating the flowers before they can seed. But in this area, passive landscaping is almost hopeless.

The dandelions know what to do.

In recent summers they’ve stopped sticking their heads up so high, and started growing tight to the ground where the lawn mower blade can’t reach them. The blossoms don’t get beheaded, and go to seed as usual. Nature finds a way, to quote a monster movie.

If I stopped passive lawnscaping for a month, the birches, sumac and raspberry bushes would know exactly what to do, too, and the yard would vanish. But as it is, the mosquitoes occupy mostly the low-rent housing in the garage to avoid the bats and everything appears neat. Even though Tolkien’s fictional forest is not as far-fetched as we think.