TORPY: Wildlife habitat, or too lazy to mow?

It’s an acquired taste for many who believe that proper landscaping is a manicured lawn, a tidy bed of tulips and a clipped row of bushes. But such artificial — and expensive — landscaped terrains aren’t particularly suited for wildlife.

Today, more people are eschewing the traditional approach, spending time to yank out invasive, green-all-year plants like English Ivy, privet and holly. They even replace their lawns with mulch and natural plants.

Again, not everyone is keen on this.

Meet Sean Crews and Gail Gustavson, a young Cobb County couple who wanted to nourish the “treasure trove of biodiversity right behind our home.”

The couple met with a woman who consults on such endeavors and excitedly threw themselves into creating a natural habitat. They learned the yard of their suburban home had soil that had largely remained undisturbed, leading to the growth of trilliums, wild ginger and saplings of native Georgia trees.

They yanked out the invasive plants, did away with most of the lawn out front by covering it with mulch and wood chip. They also put some logs around the yard — and lined their driveway — for erosion control and to create “bee hotels” and places for bugs, birds, toads and salamanders to make a go of it.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

“It was fun watching our 4-year-old chase butterflies,” Sean told me.

But no good deed goes unpunished. A few months later, they got a note on the door, a notice of violation. They had 10 days to remove the “litter,” a reference to the logs, or they’d be “subject to a fine, imprisonment or both.”

They say neighbors had appreciated their efforts and remarked pleasantly about what they’d done. But apparently someone who didn’t appreciate it dropped a dime on them to the county.

“We’ve tried to make a balance between being aesthetically pleasing for our neighbors and being good to wildlife,” Gail said. “But all it takes is just one call.”

They appealed to Cobb County, explaining they were trying to save the world from their little perch.

They say the code inspector has been professional but firm in his “no.”

One of the inspector’s emails seems like he tried to help them, albeit within the tight confinements of the county’s code: “All of the logs would be considered litter. They are essentially just sections of dead trees. Firewood could be an option if you wanted to split them into usable pieces of firewood. That would be allowed to be stored outside and could effectively be somewhat of a wildlife habitat up until the point the firewood is used.”

They appealed to Cobb Commissioner JoAnn Birrell, who checked into it and said there was a worry that logs might foster termites. Birrell noted Cobb is revising its codes but did not say how.

Credit: Gail Gustavson

Credit: Gail Gustavson

Sean shrugged while walking his property with his wife. “I get it. That’s what the code says,” he told me. They’re just following the rules.

“But the code is outdated.”

A few days after the notice, they paid to have a crew cart off their illegal bee hotels to the dump.

Kathryn Kolb, who runs a nonprofit helping people undertake such property transformations, says codes have not caught up to this new way of thinking.

“We need to distinguish between an intentional native yardscape and a delinquent owner with overgrown invasive species and an accumulation of trash,” she said.

Code enforcement officers are largely not trained in such matters. Often, Kolb said, they come out and “see it’s this tall and it has to go.”

The problem is the back-to-nature folks are running headlong into generations of thinking as to what acceptable landscaping is.

“We’re looking at a long civilization trend, the thought was to conquer nature,” Kolb said. “We need to foster natural systems rather than tame them.”

“The mainstream aesthetic is old-fashioned,” she added. “We plant plants to stay green all year that take over.”

Once, long ago, I had one of those firms with tanker trucks fertilize our lawn. It was early spring, so the grass was largely brown. I came home to find the lawn had been dyed Easter egg green. I guess the fellow thought he was doing me a favor.

In fact, the idea of lawns is unnatural. “We are essentially expanding the idea of a carpet outside our house,” Kolb said. “We have taken it to an antiseptic level, to a level that it almost dead.”

Luis Indacochea, a DeKalb resident, had a similar experience to the Cobb couple. Code enforcement was called on him because he stacked some wood and branches — he said it was less than 3 feet — to draw birds. He called it a “stumpery” and was inspired by one set up by the Beltline.

“It was a wildlife habitat right outside my house,” he said.

However, he said, “my neighbors like old-fashioned type of grass.”

DeKalb County Commissioner Ted Terry says he hears it both ways: “Your yard is unkempt. You’re yard is too manicured.”

Potato. Potahto.

“People have different degrees of intensity as to how kept their yards should be,” Terry said. “When we see a neighbor with a bad lawn our first reaction is to call the cops.”