In the partial field beneath the pines, ash, linden, maple, and wee baby oak on the edge by itself, there is grass left over from when the property had first been developed to look golf-course-adjacent. Deer love the remainder of the Tennessee bluegrass growing long amongst long-dead stalks of mountain lettuce chopped. The human weedwacker’s path and the path of the deer’s teeth coincide, overlapping in the perception of the land’s receptors. Grass cut is grass cut and the overly pernicious regionally but not locally native plant[factcheck] has been long dead without using pesticide, electric weedwacker for the win.
The dead annuals and brow grasses cut back to allow other plants, butterfly weed, to see sun in the summer, but also fire danger. It’s not a coincidence that the lower effort methods needed to cull pseudo-invasives coincides with fire mit best practices.
The problem is that we need to figure out how to mitigate risk when it’s impossible to guarantee absolute protection from wildfire? There’s fuel all around, but if you bulldoze everything in a twenty foot circle around your house, you’re doing enough enough in most circumstances, but you risk creating dead zones where no life or crops can form, or extra work for feeding, or landscape that adds fuel back into the danger zone by making the firebreaks smaller. There is easy logic here but it all exists at conflicting angles. The more fire safe you make a house, in certain respects, the more damage, impact, and destruction can occur to the surrounding natural environment. And the more an environment degrades the more you see the risk of scavenger species thriving rise. Cue mice, et al.
Of course, the more mice the better for the hawks if the mice they catch don’t have mouse poison in their belly.
So we don’t bulldoze everything, in this theoretical sandboxed property, and even if we did and it didn’t hurt the ecosystem the risk of erosion itself is reason enough to keep root systems in play when possible. Not to mention canopy and shading layers of plants keep more moisture in the ground, keeping plants and trees healthier, more resilient to drought and imminent fire damage.
This was pointed out to the property owner and I one day when an Arborist with a capital “A” visited and noted that the reason the pines were extra-stressed wasn’t just the draught conditions but the fact the deciduous tree west of them on the property was storm damaged the previous year and died, opening up what was once the groves interior trunks to sunlight for the first time, and the once shaded forest floor to harsh afternoon light. They said this was often seen as a domino effect when a western most tree in a forest dies the next trees east become the new buffer trees for environmental stresses, but because that tree up as an interior tree they have to lean into their reserves to survive the transition’s shock. If the tree’s reserves don’t outlast the environmental stresses it can spell catastrophe for the grove. Lucky for us, we have water on tap and wisdom at our beck and call.
When I say this to the property owner after the arborist leaves with their dog chilling in the back seat of the truck they remind me of hubris, and tell me to step off that high horse. Just because we know the problem doesn’t mean it’s so easy to solve. They were thinking ahead to their upcoming water bill. I let them rant for a minute, then reminded them that the arborist’s solution was to pay me to water weekly, that the cost was even higher if they expected me to do the watering for them. This sobered them up for a bit, and then we went for coffee.