Should I leave leaves in the garden?

“Are you meant to leave leaves on your garden Tim?” This is a question I often here and the response is the same as lots of gardening questions with the response being “it depends”.

Before I get into summarizing the pro and cons of leaving leaves on the garden, I thought I’d give you a bit of background to how I’ve had to deal with leaves over the years. In the early 2000s I worked for a very serious gardening business detailing gardens in the silver suburbs of Melbourne. My boss had very rigid ideas about how gardens should look, and this meant leafless! All garden beds had to have the leaves raked off them before the soil was neatly cultivated and client ready. Although this doesn’t align to how I work, the gardens did look impressive. Many of these gardens were formal in design and the leafless neatly cultivated soil really accentuated the clean crisp straight lines of the various hedges. It did at time however border on obsession. The best example of this was witnessing a client violently shaking the deciduous leaves off a tree just so he could rake them up and stop these pesky leaves from dirtying his perfect green lawn.

Anyway, here’s my thoughts of the topic.

Reasons to keep leaves on the garden

·      The colours and shapes of deciduous leaves can be beautiful and soften the garden.

·      Some leaves break down in the garden, adding nutrients and improving the structure of the soil.

·      It means you have more time to attend to other tasks in the garden.

Reasons to remove leaves from the garden

·      Too much leaf litter can create a barrier to rain infiltrating the soil.

·      Some leaves do not break down easily in the garden. (Magnolia leaves, eucalyptus leaves and other leaves with a leathery texture fall into this category.)

·      They can look messy. Particularly in formal gardens.

·      They can be collected and mixed into compost piles.

Most of my gardening decisions nowadays are based around instinct.

To guide my decision, I ask myself the following questions:

·      Will removing the leaves make the garden look better?

·      Will the colours and shapes of the leaves make the garden look better?

·      Will the leaves break down in the garden and improve soil health?

·      Will the leaves create an impenetrable barrier to rain?

What do you think? Do you subscribe to the notion that leaves are messy and must be removed, or do you like to go with the flow and let them be?