Fall Garden Cleanup: What to Cut Back and What to Leave
Why a perfectly clean fall garden is actually a mistake and how to prep for winter while supporting local wildlife.
The Urge to Purge
When the first frost hits and your garden turns brown, the instinct is to grab the shears and level everything to the ground. We have been conditioned to think that a clean garden is a healthy garden. In reality, a sterile, flat landscape is a disaster for the environment. Many of our most important pollinators, like native bees and butterflies, spend the winter tucked away in the hollow stems of dead plants or under the leaf litter. If you cut everything back and bag it up, you are literally throwing away next year's beneficial insects. Fall cleanup should be a surgical strike, not a scorched-earth policy.
What to Leave Standing
Leave the seedheads of Coneflower and Black-Eyed Susan. They are essentially bird feeders for goldfinches and other songbirds during the lean winter months. Ornamental grasses should also stay upright. They provide structural beauty in the snow and offer vital shelter for ground-nesting birds. Plants with hollow or pithy stems, like Joe-Pye Weed and Bee Balm, are where many solitary bees lay their eggs. Wait until spring, once the temperatures are consistently above 50 degrees, to cut these back. This gives the insects a chance to wake up and move out before their homes are destroyed.
When You Actually Need the Shears
There are a few instances where cutting back is mandatory for plant health. Anything that was diseased during the summer must go. If your Peony had powdery mildew or your Iris had borers, cut those leaves off and put them in the trash, not the compost. You also want to clean up mushy perennials that turn into a slimy mess after a freeze. Hosta and Daylily leaves do not provide much habitat and can harbor slug eggs, so it is fine to pull those away once they have turned yellow. For everything else, embrace the brown. A garden with winter interest and standing stalks is a living, breathing habitat that will reward you with more life come spring.