Do You Make This Costly Landscape Mistake?

Anti-mulch Landscape Design, below.

A mature landscape should not need mulch.
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Landscape Designing for dead brown mulch interspersed with green meatballs is a construct of USA garden centers & testosterone-on-wheels-mow-blow-go-commodify-all-I-touch.
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Landscape Design your garden to include covering ground with shrubs, groundcovers, perennials, bulbs, & meadow.  Enriches soil, increases pollinator habitat, decreases cost/labor.
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Significantly less to buy from the garden center & maintenance team.
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Garden & Be Well,     XO Tara
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Pic of an Arne Maynard garden found here.
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I did the dead brown mulch thing for decades.  Ugh.  Still catching up with the shrubs & groundcovers.  Where mulch is still needed I use leaf litter mulch.  Arrives free and alive with bacteria, fungi, earth worms etc.  Amazing, in hindsight, how lock-step I was with the dead brown mulch everyone-else-had.
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Most amazing landscapes, to me, employ ideas of killing all insects/fungi, mono-culture lawns unwelcome to birds/pollinators, need irrigation, nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer toxic to ground water, require men in trucks with gasoline powered machines, aka totally man-made constructs.  Where are these landscapes?  At almost every large house of worship across USA.  Their metaphor shouts, "In this house we honor G*d but surrounding it 'man' is in control."  Where are their fruit orchards to feed the hungry, meadows to feed the butterfly/bird/etc, trees bringing eyes to the sky in thanks for Earth, opportunity to gather together in strength of hand/body/mind/spirit touching Nature while pulling forth Her Bounty, harvesting fruit to feed body & Spirit with plenty leftover to give to those in need?  Oddly, have never seen that at a large house of worship.  Have seen it in community gardens.    
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A slight neo-exception I have seen is The Cove, Billy Graham's conference center.  Much of the landscaping is the retaining of Nature.  When I was in their bookstore, many years ago, I was excited to look for the garden section.  You know what I found.  Zero garden books.  And, Life began in a garden.  Link, here, to see their green meat balls in dead brown mulch at the foundation of their conference center.  Terrible metaphor of words, 'foundation-of-their-conference-center.'  

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Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.