Chip Drop

Pam Mandel transforms a 1950s-style lawn into a certified wildlife habitat.

Anna Bu Kliewer

There are ladybugs fucking in the lupines.

The ladybugs like the lupines because the lupines are covered in aphids. I don’t like the aphids; I think they’re gross. The lupine stems and seedpods are crawling with these tiny green bugs, but the ladybugs think the aphids are some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet, so there are a lot of ladybugs now.

I like the ladybugs very much, and I like that they are fucking in my lupines.

When I first moved into this 1946 home, it was surrounded by too much manicured lawn and immaculately shaped juniper hedges. “Topiary of the Eisenhower era,” an old friend called it. I was amused by the hedges at first, and by the blue jay that would tuck peanuts in them and come back later to retrieve their secret snacks.

The front lawn was confusing to me, but I liked sprawling on a blanket on the back lawn, staring into the blue of a summer sky. Then the water bill came. It was four hundred dollars. I stopped watering out front and gradually, the lawn went to dust and dandelions.

I never expected to live in a home with a yard. I had a series of tiny apartments, the last had a common garden for which I was not responsible. For a few years, I had a small plot in a community garden a few blocks from my walk-up condo. I successfully grew tomatoes and unsuccessfully grew a few other things. Zucchini. Lettuce. Some flowers. Those community garden people were hard core and humorless. You received a sharply worded email if you didn’t empty the water from the hose when you were done. It did not make me excited about gardening.

At that condo with the common garden I had a noisy downstairs neighbor, and no room for guests, and, eventually, a husband. All that precipitated a move to this 1946 house with more space, an office where I could work, and too much lawn.

It wasn’t long before we argued, the husband and I, about what to do with the yard. He didn’t mind the mowing and was apathetic about the dust in late summer, but I hated looking at the bare dirt, the increasing weeds. I had started randomly planting bulbs in the grass. Daffodils and tulips alongside the walk out front, crocuses at random in the back lawn. Little white and purple flowers that I would forget about and then be delighted by come spring.

One year, after returning from a work trip, the husband walked in the back gate. Upon seeing the lawn dotted with crocuses, he became quite angry.

“How am I supposed to mow?” he said.

“What if you just… didn’t until the flowers are done?”

“They’re in the way.”

I was confused by his bitterness. It didn’t make any sense. The flowers would fade; it could wait. It would only be a few weeks. Why was he reacting like this? There were daffodils along the low wall at the back of the garden; he said those were also in the way.

The yard was not the only thing we argued about, but the arguments about the garden became increasingly metaphoric over time — ridiculously so.

“I did it to inconvenience you,” I snarked. I couldn’t help myself.

“You probably did,” he said.

We’re divorced now. You already guessed that.

***

The rules are clearly stated.

When you sign up for Chip Drop, you must take the whole load, and you get notice right before they arrive. It’s a chaotic way to get free mulch. You have to be up for the adventure and ready to spring into action. I had been alone for a year by then, maybe it was two, I don’t remember. I thought I could handle it. How much mulch could it be?

I was coming back from walking the dog when the truck pulled into the alley. I stared at the container on the back. Oh no, I thought, what have I done? I asked the driver if I had to take the whole load. Could I not just have half?

“Nope. It’s all or nothing.” He tipped the container into the alley, covering most of the space between my fence and the fence opposite mine with a fragrant mountain of shredded tree clippings. The scent was intoxicating. All my neighbors came out.

“Well, that’s a lot of mulch, isn’t it? What’s your plan?”

It was Thursday. On Tuesdays, the city ran garbage trucks through the alley that was now blocked with 25, 30 yards of chip mulch. It had to be gone by Tuesday morning. Early.

The neighbors looked at me like I had an answer, like I knew what I was doing. I did not know what I was doing. I was terrified.

I had read about gardening: library books, websites, an online forum about permaculture, and I had been learning about the lasagna method. To lasagna your garden, you lay down cardboard, cover it with mulch, and wait. The cardboard smothers everything underneath, depriving it of light. The stuff above it holds the cardboard down and eventually feeds the soil as the cardboard decomposes.

Reading is a good place to start, but you don’t learn how to grow stuff in your yard until you get your hands dirty.

I had done this lasagna thing once before on a much smaller scale with only a few yards of mulch. In early winter, I had lined the front walk with cardboard and compost and waited until spring. My shovel cut the formerly hard ground like it was warm butter. I planted several varieties of lavender that now spill over onto the walk and hum with bumblebees much of the spring and summer. Easy enough, successful enough. So go big, I told myself — do the whole front yard.

There I was, confronted with this mountain of mulch; it had to be out of the way in four days — no question. I imagined the city calling to complain that I’d blocked their access; I imagined there would be fines.

I spent half a day panicking before coming to my senses. You’re the boss, I told myself. You’re alone now; you get to decide how things get done. When the lawn needs mowing. Where to plant flowers. When to hire some help. I made a call and the next day, two polite men from the day labor service showed up at my house. They made short work of the mulch, and by mid-afternoon, the entire front yard was buried a foot or so deep in fragrant shredded forest. When it rained, I could smell the pine and cedar. When the windows were open that woody aroma filled the house.

Time passed. I read. I planted. Things thrived or they didn’t.

The following summer, the California poppies arrived. They covered the front yard with neon orange flowers. The bees loved them. Standing out front I could hear them singing to themselves as they traveled from bloom to bloom, collecting great yellow blobs of pollen in their saddlebags.

I read up on native plants and ordered way too many from the conservation district plant sale. Every time I turned over the soil to plant the mock oranges, red dogwoods, daffodils, and tulips, I found earthworms. I randomly scattered Northwest wildflower mix, thinking it would take. The calendula did. And the lupines, where the aphids thrive and the ladybugs fuck.

Sometimes I watered. Mostly I didn’t. Friends gave me plants they’d divided from their own yards; seeds they’d collected from their crops. I put them in the ground and remembered them when I waded through the knee-deep poppies, my nails dirty from pulling stray grass.

I found myself puttering in the garden, meticulously weeding one clump of lilies, clearing around that coastal strawberry runner for ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, and then calling it a day. My dying lawn of dandelions and dust had transformed into a riot of color—orange and purple and neon green—and butterflies and ladybugs. Hummingbirds. Crows feasting on the earthworms that surfaced after the rain.

One day I was stopped by my neighbor, a quiet, keep-to-himself guy in an orderly house with regular garden service. “I just wanted you to know how much I love your wildflowers,” he said.

Another neighbor said, “Oh, I can see you’re a gardener.”

Spring came and I let the back lawn grow tall and the flowers bloom. I left the lawn mower in the garage until the last crocus wilted. No one was inconvenienced by my flowers. I wandered around in the increasingly abundant mess out front; letting things grow where they wanted to grow and not worrying much when they didn’t. It’s a certified wildlife habitat now, registered with the National Wildlife Federation.

And there are ladybugs fucking in the lupines.

Sometimes I hose off the lupines; that works to get rid of the aphids in the short term, but it doesn’t make them go away. I planted fennel and sage because they are supposed to deter the aphids long term, but the stalks are covered with those sticky green bugs all the same. There’s a much neater garden around the corner from me, their yard is also full of lupines, but they don’t have the aphid problem that I have. They also don’t have all those ladybugs, so I guess it’s a tradeoff. I’ve looked. You can’t miss them, the ladybugs, with their bright red-orange shells, their polka dots. The ladybugs are at my house, the house with the untidy garden.

I have counted four or five kinds of bees. Honeybees and fat fuzzy bumbles and a shiny greenish bee. I have hummingbirds zooming in and out of the currants in the early spring. They will be back to feed on the crocosmia and the lilies when those bloom in summer. The wild brown bunnies nap in the shadows, the earthworms turn the soil below ground. The lawn isn’t completely vanquished. It sends up tall spires and goes to seed, but no one would call that unruly meadow in front of my house a lawn. It’s a mess, a tangle of color and life, and there is no containing it.

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Pam Mandel is a memoirist, screenwriter, and podcaster. Her current passion project is the podcast CANNED, Conversations about Getting Fired. She lives in Seattle with a rescue dog named Harley. Her yard is a beautiful disaster.