4 Surprising Things You Can — and Should — Leave in Your Garden
Old logs, branches, weeds and rubble all can mount up in the yard. But before you toss out everything in the trash, it might be time to rethink what you consider garbage. The Royal Horticultural Society hosts flower shows around England, with London’s Chelsea Flower Show being the most well known in the U.S., and its shows earlier this year offered plenty of ideas for using waste materials to build a beautiful space for both humans and wildlife to enjoy.
1. Logs
If a tree has fallen or been cut down in your yard, don’t rush to get rid of the logs. Dead wood not only provides a fantastic habitat for wildlife but can be used as a raised bed.
Designer Zoe Claymore planted perennials in some rotted logs for her show garden at the Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. The result was similar to a permaculture technique known as hügelkultur, in which dead wood is used to create a raised bed.
Decaying wood is much better at retaining moisture than soil and provides plenty of nutrients for plants, so it’s a great way to ensure that your landscape is resilient during periods of drought.
2. Branches and Twigs
You also can utilize the branches and twigs from trees and shrubs you’ve pruned. One way to use these woody cuttings is by forming them into a “dead hedge,” as showcased by RHS Wisley at the same event.
Layered birch brush was woven into a circular enclosure with a hedgehog tunnel at the bottom and some decorative nooks of mixed materials. The design team says these natural fences provide a shelter for wildlife, such as wasp beetles, newts, banded snails, glow worm beetles, wrens, song thrushes and hedgehogs.
3. Weeds
Instead of spending hours clearing weeds, you could rethink how you feel about these unloved plants. This was certainly the message this year, with the Chelsea Flower Show renaming weeds “hero plants.” A third of the show gardens at the event incorporated plants usually referred to as weeds; one of these was Cleve West’s Centrepoint Garden, shown here, which featured plants such as dandelion, cleavers and herb robert.
West says this was an experiment “to see whether a mix of ornamentals and so-called weeds can cohabit in an aesthetically pleasing way.”
4. Rubble
If you move into a new home to find the yard full of bricks or other building waste, you might not need to get rid of all of it. This year’s shows offered plenty of examples of plants growing in rubble, as designers sought to demonstrate how to rewild urban areas by working with the existing substrate.
At the Chelsea Flower Show, for example, Jon Davies and Steve Williams used rubble as a planting medium in their show garden, as did Kate Bradbury and Jo Thompson in the RHS Wildlife Garden they designed for Hampton Court, shown here.
“You’d be amazed how well rubble will support many woody plants,” RHS chief horticulturist Guy Barter says on the organization’s website. “They won’t grow as fast as in rich soil, but the poor nutrient value and good drainage [are] highly suitable for Mediterranean plants.”