Autumn Garden Cleanup - the 2025 Edition

Today was autumn garden cleanup day at our Homegrown National Park in Medfield, Massachusetts.  The most amazing part is that it started at 10 a.m. and was over at 2 p.m. Four hours is likely a record that will stand for a long time.

My neighbors have either raked or blown (or both) their leaves at least half a dozen times (or had a service do it for them). My leaves aren’t going anywhere: they’re going to home for insects and pollinators for this winter. By spring (if we get a sufficient amount of snow), they’ll be largely composted, and I’ll need only clear them from the walkways.

The Magnolia bed was first on the agenda simply because I have to look at it as I pull into the driveway. The bed bordering the driveway is three layers deep: Amsonia, Veronia, and Vernonia closest to the driveway; more Vernonia (especially 'Iron Butterfly' ), and peonies in the middle layer, and Pyncantheum (mountain mints) in the rear.

Amazingly, it took less than 45 minutes to take it all down, including leaving the thick Amsonia stalks at least 14 inches long. Those stalks are hollow, and large enough to provide a home for, say, bees. The best part, though, is I don't have to look at yellowing plants any more.

The sun garden was the other major time consumer. It is now approximately 300 square feet of flowering perennials - rudbeckia, betony, oxyeye daisies, monarda, asclepias, and Carolina lupines.  But, the plants fell into two categories: spent, and those still with seedheads.

The solution was to cut down the perennials, but leave the seedheads where they fell for those plants that could still provide sustenance for birds and other creatures; but carry away everything else. Cutting was made somewhat more difficult because things like daisies and rudbeckia already have next year's greens in place.

The sidewalk bed looked, at first glance, like it needed nothing more than to be swept. That's when I noticed, with all its leaves off, the growth spurt our spicebush (Lindera benzoin) had put on over the summer.... think five additional feet on a shrub that claimed its height topped out at seven feet and would remain 'compact'.

Twenty minutes later, I had brought its height back to its prescribed level and shaped it at the same time. The more fundamental problem is that the recommended three foot distance from sidewalk to center stem is inadequate. This spicebush wants to stretch out; and its lateral growth also is impeding two viburnums (maple leaf and cranberry) from reaching their potential. I'll kick that can down the road for another year.

The back of the driveway presents its own challenge. It's where the bulk of the snow goes from the parking turnaround. In snowy years, the pile at the back can get to six feet. Perennial debris left underneath that snow will rot and become a petri dish for disease.

So, of course, that area, too, needed to be taken down to stubble. It all looks very nice, though I admit I miss the gorgeous gold Amsonia that occupies the space in the autumn. 

The rear garden took no time at all to clear because, well, it's just fallen leaves. And, I'm perfectly content to let those leaves lie where they are. If we get any decent amount of snow, those leaves will be partly composted by next spring. I'll need only rake them out of the paths.

The nicest part of the cleanup was that what happens on Pine Street stays on Pine Street. Every load of cut-down perennials was carted to a brush pile that is on our property but adjacent to the abutting conservation land. The brush pile will provide winter shelter to garden wildlife. Over time, it will break down into soil, with some intermediate stops.

Four hours after I began cutting the Amsonia by the garage, I realized I had nothing more that needed to be done. It doesn't mean I won't find lots of clean-up tasks. It just means that the things that were 'gotta do's' were done the day before Thanksgiving.

Now, that's something to be thankful for.

(Alright, a confession: there is a parking pad at the very front of the property that will be raked free of leaves. They, too, will go into the brush pile.)

The Upside of Downed Trees

There is nothing quite so jarring as walking out of your home at the first light of morning to find a 50-foot-long debris field of trees in your driveway. But, that’s exactly what I found three days ago when I went out to fetch the newspapers in my driveway.

The pine was basically hollow

 A cold front had come through overnight with forecasted strong winds out of the northeast. Sometime during the night, one of those gusts became the last gasp for a towering, but badly aging 50-foot-tall white pine on my neighbor’s property. The tree snapped off about 15 feet off the ground, revealing a huge, empty chamber that once had been the tree’s heartwood and pith; surrounded by a few inches thickness of still-living outer bark, inner bark, and sapwood.

The ornamental plum, 
stripped of all branches

As it fell, though, the tree smashed through two deciduous trees. One was a Norway maple (no loss), the other a beautiful, 40-foot-tall ornamental plum that had a dazzling spring bloom and lovely fall foliage. The pine’s weight and still-growing upper breadth effectively cleaved the two trees of all of their branches, leaving only tall trunks.

 Everything else was on my driveway.

The debris field stretched 50 feet

I may or may not still own a chainsaw. If I do, I have no idea where it is and I don’t keep the gas/oil mixture it requires to run. But I do have two exceedingly sharp corona saws, and so I went to work clearing enough of a pathway so I could get my car out of the garage. That took an hour. Just as I was finishing, my neighbor came over; astonished at what had happened, profuse in apology for not seeing the carnage, and saying he would get all the debris off my property using his pickup and chains.

The ornamental plum in its heyday

He did a very thorough job; even clearing the brush from what had been a twenty-foot-wide no-mans-land between our two properties. I would have pitched in but was otherwise obliged to help make ‘dump runs’ between the Community Garden and town transfer station as part of the season-end clean-up of the garden.

When I got back, I was astonished at the transformation: for the first time in a decade, the sun was shining on our perennial border.

As you can see from the shadows,
the perennial border was in shade

When Betty laid out the garden that we would have in lieu of grass, she knew there was only a narrow strip of soil between the edge of our driveway and the property line we share with our neighbor. But, it was 70 feet long and deserved to be filled with visually arresting shrubs and perennials. Our neighbor’s trees were eleven years younger and so what she chose and we planted was a mix of tall-ish flowering perennials that required six to eight hours a day of sunlight. We also built two, four-foot-by-eight-foot raised beds in which we planned to grow strawberries and leaf vegetables.

With the trees gone, there's now
hope for our raised beds.

Nature, however, took its course. To create our garden, we took down roughly 40 pines on our property (all, I might add, of a similar vintage to the one that crashed over). We filled the space with young trees and shrubs. The trees in our neighbor’s no-man’s-land promptly reached out for the now-ample sunshine to their south. Within three years, our raised beds no longer got enough sun even for a crop of lettuce. The sun-seeking perennials that did not die out began reaching out into the driveway for light. Much of the border was re-planted with shade-tolerant perennials.

 I’m now faced with a wonderful opportunity of re-planting the border with brighter, more sun-loving perennials. Yes, it will be a lot of work. So what?

 Who knew there was such an upside to having three downed trees?