As I write this, my garden is still standing — though some might say it’s standing on borrowed time.
Some might glance at my wilted, withering wasteland of defunct flowers and “tsk” at my tardiness in cleaning things up, but to my way of thinking, those tsk-ers are dead wrong. To my way of thinking, an Illinois garden only arrives at its true calling in late October, when the colorful flower petals are long gone and the seeds cluster atop the dry, crispy stalks.
Because, after all, what is the true purpose of a flower? If you asked the plants, you might be surprised to learn that they couldn’t care less how much you love their colorful blooms. Their fragrant, full-color display is only there to attract bees and butterflies, the plants will tell you in no uncertain terms.
And what’s the point of all those bees and butterflies, you ask the plants?
Why, to carry pollen in and out to ripen our seeds, so we can make the next generation of ourselves, the plants insist. Nothing more than that.
If you could talk to the goldfinches, I’m sure they would approve. Right now nearly a dozen of them are clinging to waving stalks of dry coneflowers and heliopsis in my garden, plucking the ripe seeds for their lunch.
How do the plants feel about the finches’ thievery? Well, finches are pretty sloppy with their dining habits, dropping more seeds to the ground than they get in their gullets. Those seeds will sprout next spring wherever they fall, and next year’s garden will look whatever way randomness decides to make it look.
The plants are fine with that.
I am too.
It’s called “chaos gardening,” and it’s the latest trend in eco-friendly gardening. It’s fun to learn that the world is just starting to come around to what I’ve been doing for the past decade or so.
According to Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape state specialist from Colorado State University, “Chaos gardening is the practice of mixing a wide variety of seeds…and scattering them over a planting area with minimal planning. The goal is to create a dense, colorful garden that surprises you with its variety… a bit like making soup from everything in your pantry.”
(For the record, that’s pretty much how I’ve always made soup, too. I called it “Goop Mélange,” and my kids loved the adventure of eating it.)
So yes, if you’re a lover of brightly colored fragrant blooms, my once-vibrant summer garden would look a bit ragged to you right now. But then again, if you trimmed your garden back a month ago, you’re probably wondering where all those colorful finches have gone.
They’re here, right outside my window, feasting on seeds. It’s the late-season bounty, as colorful as a field of fresh flowers, that makes autumn my favorite time of year.
But I’ve saved the best for last to tell you about, because right now in my garden I’m also enjoying a bounty that you may never have seen in all your life if you’re a tidy trimmer.
That’s because my late-season dying garden is also home to praying mantises, which always show up in late September and stick around to feast and breed. Just yesterday, I tallied seven different mantises lurking among the drying garden plants, plucking wasps, moths and box elder bugs to dine on.
Thanks to my great-grandkids, some of them now have names, like Chomp. Others are still anonymous. But they’re there, and they’re staying put, because my withering garden provides them everything they could hope for in the declining days of their lives—shelter, abundant insect food, and a place to lay their eggs for the next generation to begin.
Every praying mantis in northern Illinois will die when winter comes. That’s just the way it is—not one will survive winter. And the only way for the species to survive is for them to pick a dead stalk on which to lay their eggs, a foamy blob that will dry to resemble a toasted marshmallow, which will hatch into a hundred or more tiny mantises next May or June.
Of course, I will have cut down the dead stalks long before then. So that’s my early November task: to carefully search through the withered stalks and to save the egg cases—called ootheca — before cutting the garden back and getting out the yard-waste bags. I’ll save the egg cases in a protected spot to survive through the winter, and sometime next spring the tiny mantises will emerge, no larger than a mosquito.
Once hatched, they will head off into the wild world of my blooming chaotic garden, so tiny that I won’t see them all summer. They will lurk deep in the foliage, dining on whatever insect they can handle — aphids and tiny spiders at first, maybe beetles or grasshoppers later as they grow.
By September, after they’ve shed their skin a half dozen times, they will have grown to four inches long or more. Large enough now to have few natural enemies, they’ll move up to the top of my chaos garden, where I’ll find them breeding and munching on even the largest wasps and hornets.
Just this morning, I found my first seed case of the season, and it’s only a matter of time before I find others. I have watched three of the females mating with males over the past few weeks, and this morning a new randy pair were getting acquainted in the withered leaves of my faded irises.
So that makes a total of nine mantises in my yard today. At least. With babies on the way next spring.
And it’s all happening right now, right there outside my window, in my brown, borrowed-time chaos garden.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
