Communicating with NatureSeptember 2026
GEORGE ELIOT
This autumn, raise your standards. Replace all or part of your lawn with organic native trees, self-seeding meadow grasses, and pollinator flowers and plants. Create corridors of certified wildlife habitats that attract and protect our pollinators and wildlife. It’s easy and fun to add the garden and landscape elements needed: food, water, shelter from weather, and a place for wildlife to raise their young.
As I wrote in my blog post, Keeping Nature Wildly Beautiful, avoid carcinogenic and other costly carbon-releasing herbicides linked to deadly diseases, dysfunctions, pollinator loss, and climate change. Eliminate equally destructive synthetic fertilizers that emit greenhouse gases from manufacture through application. Rather than prevent weeds, killing agents also found in synthetic fertilizers counterproductively exacerbate the deadening conditions that cause weeds to spread.
A local conservancy volunteer provided my husband and I with a free assessment of our chemical-free property. We learned to eliminate invasive greenery, and to add native shrubs, flowers and plants. We expanded our row of thick sheltering shrubs and, now, regularly refresh our bird bath.
Every Autumn, my husband and I replace costly and weighty mulch that can attract termites with raked leaves. This adds a balance of nutrients, and allows the beneficial insects who live in our fallen leaves to thrive.
When necessary across lawn areas, we aerate compacted soil to improve natural drainage and vitality. We use an aerator with hollow tines, because solid tines can further compact our soil. Aeration or oxygenation in richly alive organic soil can naturally sustain itself.
Autumn is an ideal time to over-seed lawns or areas that are weedy and bare with uncoated organic grass seeds. We select a native mix of seeds suited to our soil, climate and land use.
Our environmentally responsive municipality — which shifted to organic landscaping — allows homeowners to replace their lawns with native pollinators. We now grow our grass tall enough to shade out weed seeds. This allows our thick and nutrient-rich turf to sustain itself.
Similarly responsive residents are creating Climate Action Neighborhoods that include safe landscaping. We are cost-effectively expanding corridors of regenerative landscapes that protect our shared resources while restoring the quality of all life.
Join us, and enjoy the healthful tranquility of wildly beautiful organic parks in your own yard or community.
How are corridors of wildlife habitats raising the quality of all life in your area?
Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).
Note: If you have found this post helpful, you can subscribe to my blog here at no charge! Thank you for sharing your organic landscaping insights here on Facebook and Twitter.
Recommended Media
Beyond Pesticides’ free Parks for a Sustainable Future program and Rewild Your Campus.
Create and certify a wildlife friendly landscape or garden space.
Lancaster PA’s Climate-Action Neighborhood
Project Drawdown with science-based climate solutions.
Pollinators Are in Trouble: Here Is How Transforming Your Lawn Into A Native Wildflower Habitat Can Help by Discover magazine.
Bringing Nature Home – How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas W. Tallamy.
Documentaries: Down to Earth with Zac Efron, Kiss the Ground, and Groundswell with Woody Harrelson, The Biggest Little Farm, and more.
Tools for Change from Non-Toxic Communities that thrive in wildly beautiful and cost-effective organic landscapes.
Organic Manifesto by Maria Rodale.
Silent Spring and any communications by Rachel Carson.
