It doesn’t’t take long to find a yard in most areas that seems to have gone wild. Wild in the sense that it does not have the tidy trademarks of a conventional garden.

No clipped bushes, no big blocks of crisp emerald lawn with neatly trimmed edges along the sidewalk. No perfectly oval Bradford pears or statuesque ornamental grasses.

In the wild yard, lawns are diminished, while wildflowers and grasses dominate. At times, they may grow wide, flirting with the sidewalk edge. They also grow densely together, in loosely defined groupings (if any at all).

A diverse array of plants bloom in spring, summer and fall, all without mulch. Their owners keep dried seed heads and grass leaves standing through winter, and in spring, cut them back, leaving considerable stubble.

New perspective on lawns

To the untrained eye, this landscape looks uncared for. It lacks the familiar touches to which we have become accustomed.

Like most people my age (which my 15-year-old son says is “just old”), my sense of garden place was honed by conventional garden practices. Weed-free lawns, straight hedges and ornamental plants resistant to pests (i.e., beetles, bugs, ants, aphids, butterflies, moths, wasps, sawflies, bees and hoppers). What I experienced in my early horticulture career led me to believe that wild gardens like these were too wild for many homeowners.

Now when I see a wild garden, I see it differently. Naturally fallen tree leaves lying in a garden bed strikes me as normal, because that’s where luna moths and woolly bear caterpillars overwinter in cocoons. When I see holes punched into plant leaves, I hope to spot the caterpillar that chewed on them, so I can see positive evidence of my attempts to “wild up” the yard.

When I take a walk and encounter a plant reaching into the sidewalk, I take notice. It slows me down and draws me in, as if the plant was tapping me on the toe to say, “Hey human, slow down. Enjoy the poppy mallows.” I want to meet the garden’s owner someday and say thanks.

Benefits to wildlife

To me, these are worthy trademarks of fine gardening. These practices work for wild gardens, and they can work in tidy conventional gardens, too. After all, humans aren’t the sole beneficiaries of a garden.

We could promote more insect diversity by changing a few simple gardening practices. The birds we enjoy in spring depend on it, as we depend on the ethereal calls of songbirds to help wash away those late-winter blues. Happy wild gardening!

Woodbury, a horticulturist, is a curator of the Whitmore Wildflower Garden at Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit and an adviser to the Missouri Prairie Foundation’s Grow Native! program.