Echoes from the Outside

Alex Lampert from Eco Echo Studio | 01.14.25

Winter is Full of Wonders We Don’t See

Winter is often characterized by absence. With less light, there is darkness. Gone is the rich soundscape of endless buzzing and chirping insects. Leaves that caught warm breezes now rest on the ground. In place of lush, green density, there is negative space between branches that yields long, clear sightlines. Where the built environment thins out, you can watch a bird hop from bare limb to bare limb across long stretches of topography. All that remains of the growing season are the last leaves clinging before they’re shed: burnished oak and copper beech leaves that hang on and glow in mottled patches in the woods til spring. 

Here in the Outer Piedmont, when sunlight lessens and temperatures drop, and following October’s typically drier weather, the impressive mechanisms that produce this negative space kick in. Unlike evergreens like needled pines or glossy doghobble, our deciduous plants have no mechanisms to protect their leaves against freezing. Plants, of course, contain water, and we know what happens to vessels of water when they freeze. In this way, letting go of leaves that would injure beyond repair is a protective mechanism. In order to grow, deciduous plants let go of the parts of themselves that would cause damage if held onto.

To do this (and in times of stress), trees develop a protective barrier between branch and leaf. Less sunlight means less photosynthesis, less food coming in via chloroplasts in leaves, and less replenishing of green chlorophyll. Trees absorb what nutrients they can from leaves and store those in safe places. As chlorophyll breaks down relatively quickly, other existing nutrients in leaves show their color spectrums: crimson and purple anthocyanins, yellow and orange carotenoids. Dying is made a gorgeous spectacle. The barrier strengthens and leaves lose access to water. They dry and eventually fall off. This leaves a small scar on the branch. Forests are full of scars.

Shedding leaves isn’t an end point, though. It’s a stage in an endless cycle. Leaves break down on the ground, giving up any remaining nutrients to the soil, which trees will take up. This is probably the most intuitive argument for leaving leaves: trees evolved with these nutrient cycles and removing leaves from the ground deprives trees of a fundamental source of food. Atlanta is a city hugged by trees that tower over our existence. We need them to be healthy. Less intuitive, but growing in popularity, is exploring what happens to the remaining carbon in many dead leaves. Leaving leaves, it turns out, acts as a carbon sink. Blowing and towing them away, on the other hand, requires fossil fuels and emits carbon.

If fall is the season of death and spring rebirth, then winter is the inbetween, the liminal dormant phase. During the dark-houred season, rather than growing outward toward light, plants’ energy is focused inward and downward. This, along with our cool-season rains, is why winter is the ideal time to plant trees and shrubs. Planting now (outside of this once-in-many-years snowstorm) allows for them to establish resilient root systems before spring’s flush of growth and summer’s blazing sunlight and heat. 

So much life is concentrated below or on the ground. The majority of the insects we’re used to seeing throughout summer are overwintering now, nesting in and on the ground, under leaves, in brush piles, on twigs, and in hollow stems. This is, of course, a major reason why it’s important to leave leaves alone, or at a minimum, have places where they and the ground are left alone. The ground is home to millions of creatures that we depend on and don’t see.

Our food crops require pollinators, which primarily means bees, among many other species, bees. The US is home to nearly 3,600 native bee species – these are not the European honeybee, Apis mellifera, so often mentioned in “save the bees” discourse, but they are very much imperilled due to loss of habitat and food sources. 70% of native bees nest in “bare” ground, which means uncovered space between plants or the ground that opens up as perennials die back. The other 30% nest in tunnels in snags – standing but dead or dying trees. Bees have no home among ubiquitous turf lawns and paved surfaces, and we need them to survive.

Typically, we don’t intentionally include other species’ habitats in our garden designs (although I’m personally excited for an upcoming project where I’ll explore species-specific habitat restoration). Butterflies and moths need leaf litter, brush piles, and native plants, often specific species called host plants, to lay their eggs or form their chrysalises, many of which look like leaf litter. Winter may appear to be absent of life, but dormancy is deceiving. There’s so much life preparing to emerge that we just don’t perceive.

While our yards alone cannot save the world (as I explored in my last newsletter), they can make an important, collective impact. We can, very easily, choose to turn our yards into carbon sinks rather than sources of emissions. We can also choose to host the wildlife we depend on rather than unwittingly push it further and further away. There’s a lot to say about the fires burning in LA right now, far more than can fit into a pre-existing draft, but at a bare minimum, the conditions that made them catastrophic are caused by humans, specifically, people in power who bear the largest share of responsibility for climate change. We need to change so much, including power structures and how we care for land.

I know that by this time of year, most people have already dealt with fallen leaves, but it’s never too late to start including ecology rather than excluding it. (I’ll get into how this exclusion became the cultural, stylistic default in an upcoming newsletter, but it’s not your fault for not knowing how to counter or navigate this. That’s why I do my work.) Designing for leaf-mulched beds with beautiful plant species under trees is still possible, even if you’ve sent leaves away. Again, this season is the ideal time for planting trees and shrubs. There’s a broad spectrum of strategies for leaving leaves and including biodiversity that ranges from tidy, universally legible designs, to eco-contemporary design, to reforesting and rewilding land. There’s plenty of room within this range for personal style and cultural expression. It can be you, and it doesn’t have to be ecologically purist, but it does require some shifts.

Adapting in this way means accepting, even embracing, something more aligned with this beautiful land we get to inhabit rather than pushing nature away and forcing something old that doesn’t stand up to the challenges of the present. Letting go of old ways tends to leave scars. But sometimes, that’s just how we grow.

What I’ve Been Up To

• The initial research stages of a big habitat-oriented project: starting with invasive removal, followed by plantings targeted at providing food and shelter for specific species. Research will identify certain imperiled species, their plant needs within this eco-region, and then I’ll design those into the property in ways that look and feel good. There will be so much observation time and data collection. I am so excited.

• Winter sowing native perennials to potentially cultivate a native dye-shed for textile creatives — if this interests you, please connect!

• A 100% native privacy screen that will provide lots of bird food and integrate some under-utilized but very cool looking plants

• Various small, native plantings across a large property to provide visual interest, functional support for erosion control and invasive suppression, and wildlife benefits like host plants and food sources

• A food-oriented, kid-friendly back yard scape that will include tons of fruit, sleek, raised vegetable beds, and lots floral interest

  If you want to work with me, reply or click here

Calling all native plant & environmental enthusiasts & philanthropists

Nearly Native Nursery is for sale, and they’re open to selling in a range of ways. If you’ve never been, you should visit because it’s so much more than a plants-in-pots operation; it’s a beautiful garden of native species, and it’s been around long enough to host mature shrubs and trees along with endangered, rare, and hard-to-find species like the above, colorful selection of Monarda punctata. There’s nothing like it. If you know of anyone who might be interested in purchasing or funding what it could be (like a non-profit environmental center, for example), then please reach out to them (or me).