Celebrate Native Plant Seed Heads

This is the time of year when folks begin cleaning up their landscapes, cutting down grasses and stems, applying mulch and even fertilizer -- all practices most of us don't need to do if we favor low maintenance gardening. And really, seeing someone cut down grasses is like putting a knife through my heart; all of that beauty, wildlife shelter, and food is wasted. In two months folks will be crying for mercy in the middle of winter, saying how there's nothing to look out on in their gardens. Why not? Leave those gardens up. Provide shelter for wildlife. Increase the snow-capturing qualities of the garden to insulate it and provide more moisture during the spring melt. Plus, lots of things are hibernating out there in hollow stems and under leaf litter -- bees, butterflies, beetles, et cetera.

I love fall. I love what it leaves (pun intended). I love the echo of life, the shadow of memory, the absence which is more profound, the negative space that gives the garden and the gardening year substance and definition. Give me detritus. Give me barren stalks and dried leaves backlit by warm winter sunlight. And most especially, give me the seed heads that, more and more as I get older, trump the blooms they came from.

Why would you cut this down? Swoon.

Wild Senna, Senna hebecarpa, in the foreground.

Giant Hyssop, Agastache foeniculum

Purple Prairie Clover, Dalea pupurea

Dwarf Blue Indigo, Baptisia australis var. minor

Ironweed, Vernonia fasciculata

Culver's Root, Veronicastrum virginicum

Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca

Ozark Bluestar, Amsonia illustris

Tall Coreopsis, Coreopsis tripteris

Round-Headed Bush Clover, Lespedeza capitata

Common Yarrow, Achillea millefolium

Virginia Mountain Mint, Pycnanthemum virginianum

Black-Eyed Susan, Rudbeckia hirta

Stiff Goldenrod, Solidago rigida

Gimme seed heads

And don't forget about the fall color that many of our herbaceous perennials and grasses give us, which often rival shurb and leaf color. No, really, I'm serious.

Amsonia hubrichtii in its early stage, on the way to rusty orange

Swamp Milkweed, Asclepia incarnata

Little Bluestem

Liatris ligulistylis

Wild Senna

More than winter interest -- it's winter awesome.