Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Lent is a good reminder of the depth of love, reality of loss
• Natural world evokes the return of our sense
• Money, politics corrupt language, but we don't have to listen

To a gardener, fallen leaves and pine needles are just like manna from heaven. Yet what do most of us do with this treasure? Rake it to the street for the city to take away.

-- Steve Bender, Southern Living magazine

Let me tell you about my hideous lawn! Before you hurry outdoors to attack the sprinklement of leaves that may have landed on your own mini-golf course since last night, take a break and realize: your lawn will always look better than Liza's.

It's not that I don't rake leaves. Last week, my town held its October yard-waste pickup, so the whole neighborhood was dragging bags and scraping leaves over the curb. Being the eager worker-citizen, I happily spent the invigorating dusk hours pulling leaves over the curb. It's true that I raked them in reverse, from the street back into my yard, but only because I figured they'd do little good out there on the asphalt.

I also made my annual twilight trick-or-treat rounds through the 'hood, hauling bagged leaves off the curb and shoving them boisterously into my little car to tote back home. "How divine!" I thought, exuberantly squashed between bags, wet leaf meal mashed on my cheek, trying to shift gears. The car innards, steeped in dark, woodsy, tannic odors, gave me the giddy sense of driving around in a giant tea bag -- or a portable forest.

This, of course, was the point.

"It takes between 500 and 1,000 years to create an inch of topsoil," Ellen Reynolds, a master naturalist and herb farmer in Wythe County, told me. "Since none of us will be here to see that, we need to save and create topsoil. Once this precious soil is gone, our ability to grow something will require lots of chemical fertilizer, which is already causing problems in our water."

I knew what she meant.

A dozen years ago, upon moving here, I found a flat, shadeless lawn with few trees and no birds or diversity, mystery or beauty. In every direction, one could see and smell only houses and traffic. The endless monoculture lawn took four hours to mow and produced no blooms, fruit, shade or songbird cover -- nothing at all useful. A bare creek bisected the land, glinting in the sunlight and devoid of crawdads.

"Don't creeks need shade?" I wondered, and quickly ordered hundreds of seedlings from the Department of Forestry.

I didn't know anything about dirt, but realized -- hacking hole after hole into the bricklike clay -- mine surely could not help a tree grow.

"Trees need nutrients from their own leaf litter," advised the Arbor Day Foundation that year, urging homeowners not to rake away their trees' own valuable nutrition -- a rootless American ritual that was gradually starving and weakening our nation's residential trees.

But how did you retain leaf-litter before your trees had any to drop?

"Could I have your leaves?" I asked a neighbor, across the creek, one day. He was about to bundle a barnload of them into a hundred Hefty sacks. Baffled, but happy to abbreviate his labors, he helped rake them across the street to dump in my yard.

Traveling around town, I added to this potpourri. "May I've your leaves?" "May I've your leaves?"

"They'll kill your grass," warned one lady with an immaculate lawn.

"Terrific," I agreed, and roared away with a bulging carload.

The amused town maintenance crew began dumping whole truckloads into my gone-lawn, until a mountain high as the roof had formed. By the next year, with some wheelbarrow work and rain, the mountain had sunk down into a foot-high compost of rich humus. I brought in wildflower and tree seeds from mountain hikes. Utility crews dumped loads of chips down my banks, and the night air smelled sweet and dank as a camp out in a mountain hollow.

Today, this uncivilized lawn has become a joyful yard -- full of uncouth humus, violets, buttercups, jewelweed, butterflies, turtles, toads, scrub pines and wild-grape vines. The flat real estate has gone three-dimensional, raised 60 feet skyward by deeply mulched poplars and maples, birches and sycamores, cypress and willow and ash trees. The creek has a riparian buffer, shade and water striders. Warblers, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, vireos and chickadees have returned -- along with a quivery nighttime screech owl.

My improper lawn may have brought down the neighborhood, but the yard provides a water filter, air cooler, oxygen, birdsong, habitat, leaf-blower-free quietness, mystery and a complex woods that attracts children bored by the usual tame, deforested, suburban lawnscape.

It's also a source of good local dirt ("Have you seen that wild yard?") -- and provides relief for competitive ChemLawn owners who can be sure, knowing my yard exists, the grass will always remain greener on their own side!