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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No mulch - mulch has no place in a real garden, people! It's ugly and serves no purpose.
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Silliest thing I’ve ever heard.[/quote]

That's because you've never paused to look at real gardens, and you've drunk the landscaping cool-aid. None of the landscaping companies around here have real gardeners - they're just recent migrants under a non-gardening manager replicating a rather ugly and expensive model of high-maintenance lawn + mulch beds (sparsely dotted with the occasional flowering plant and tree). No garden is actually like this! Mulch is essentially the symbol of a failed garden.

You want to mass plantings so mulch is not needed. If you don't want a lawn, you can have groundcover plants, water features, gravel, bricks or stone pathways. But borders and island plantings don't need mulch. Even when transitioning, as PP said, mulch is not actually necessary - you can put your lawn clippings or tree trimmings down instead with the same physical and chemical effect. There is hardly ever a gardening reason to buy mulch, ever.

- European who has had many gardens in Germany, France, the UK and now here, and who has visited hundreds of famous gardens in Europe and Asia. No mulch in any of them.
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I think it all really depends on the circumstances. My DH is not a gardener. But, he has strong opinions about how a garden should look, and it's the neat and tidy, plants in a row like soldiers with mulch underneath them, kind of look. I'm a gardener, and my love is for cottage gardens, plants so thick that weeds are not a problem. So the compromise solution is that the spaces that are more public are his, and "tidy", and the ones that are more private are mine, and less tidy. I'm slowly converting about 1/2 acre into a native garden, and I do find it helpful to have mulch down, as a way to deter weeds, as I pop in a few plants here and there. I will probably be done in 10 years, at which point there won't be any need for mulch for my garden.[/quote]

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