Why mulch?
About fifty years ago most suburban homeowners asked, “Why landscape my yard? I like lawn.” Trees and shrubs seemed in the way keeping neighbor from neighbor. Fences were unfriendly. These were the days of the spreading lawns; the openness of meadow where lots of kids could play with moms nearby. No one talked much about mulch.
In many quarters today, moms and children have disappeared. Fences are erected. Garden rooms have replaced the meadow in some places. In others foundation landscaping planted 50 years ago still struggles. Here, homeowners seem bothered that there is an outdoors at all. Even in the city the grounds around a house remains a “yard”. A place for kids, but there are no children. Dogs bark.
Whereever today’s metropolitan house is set, however, there is likely to be found “mulch”.
Without ever having taken a scientific survey, my eyes and work over the past 35 years have told me the mulch most frequently used somewhere around that metropolitan house was stone…..either river rock or chipped limestone dumped over a spread of black plastic. “No maintenance” demanded the homeowner. “Low maintenance” pleads the more realistic 2009 Twin Cities’ homeowner. “Stone mulch!” answered the obedient landscaper.
And so, the home yard around the house was covered with stone.
We, at Masterpiece, much appreciate this small measure of improvement in popular homeowner attitude toward “stone” and “yard”….We are against both, for we prefer the term “grounds”. “Beautifying the Home Grounds” is so much more winsome in our world of landscape art than, “Beautifying the Home Yard”….don’t you agree? And we prefer organic mulches.
Although we will gladly work the home yard, a homeowner should always be aware, our ultimate goal is to make the “grounds” beautiful, no matter how small or how ugly the home yard.
Until recently organic mulch was not much mulled over. Commercial and government buildings alike…even religious institutions led the way uglifying the beautiful verdant Earth with moonlike settings of crushed limestone or river rock around the structures they planned and built. Beauty was never a consideration, so crushed limestone and river rock became the standard for home and commercial mulch “beauty”. If one sees this moonscape here and everywhere, well, it must be beautiful, for the “experts” tell us so……and indeed, they did.
“Landscaping” classes at our local State university and Vo-tech institutions told us so, recommending stone mulchs, regardless how ugly, and taught the required calculations of the tonnages needed for the dumpings. Beauty in the grounds always was an irritation, anyway! Wasn’t it supposed to be in the “eye of the beholder”? “Why can’t people “‘behold’ chipped stone and river rock everywhere?” it might have been argued.
For the homeowner who would prefer not to make the Earth’s surface more ugly and lifeless, let us consider mulches other than the “stoned”. Most have become available only recently.
In the modern homeowners’ vernacular mulch means a layer of some matter laid over the ground to prevent the growth of weeds.
Usually there are two stated purposes beyond weed control for using organic mulch as a soil covering around plants: to conserve moisture and prevent erosion. If organic mulches are applied rather regularly around plants, they add organic matter to the area. Moisture and nutrients are rendered more available to plants on a more regular basis.
There are mulch chips, shredded mulch, and double shredded mulch; pine needle mulch, pine bark mulch and pine chip mulch. Add to this list, hardwood bark, shredded hardwood bark, and hardwood chips, straw mulch, oak leaf mulch, cedar mulch, cypress mulch….even newspaper mulch.
Some mulches are dyed…..brown, tan, black or garrish….the look of something sold as “red”. Some folks like garish.
Most homeowners concerned about landscaping as an art form generally prefer ones eye to flow from plant to plant rather from mulch to mulch, but there might be an exception. What if the garden is only of mulches? Then one could go wild using chipped white rock, blue trap rock, lava rock, pink quartz or recycled auto and truck tires as well as all those mulches already named.
Organic mulches will eventually break down and become “soil”. The area will need replacement mulch….so therein lies the complaint from the homeowner demanding low maintenance.
Only in the dead environment is there no maintenance. But then, no one would be around to enjoy the beauty of the landscapes we at Masterpiece created.