Your Leaves Should Get Chewed Up

Silk bay (Persea humilis) and leafcutter bee "damage"

As I continue with this social isolation mode, I find that my landscape is one of the few things that gives me peace of mind and something to do with all my "spare time.".  In actuality, I spend far more time watching things than I actually spend "doing" something, but over the years I've found that much of what I think I know about plants and wildlife comes from this. Too few of us spend time in our landscapes actually observing how things work than we spend time trying to do something.
Over these past weeks, I've had the time to see what pollinators are actually sharing my landscape with me. I've been able to observe which blooms they use the most and which plants they prefer to use as hosts for their larvae. My Spanish needles (Bidens alba) actually gets used by very little except the European honeybees, for example. As a member of the aster family, it too is a good pollinator plant, but in my landscape I have a lot of aster family choices. Most of my other bee species have been making much more use of my starry rosinweed (Silphium astreriscus) than anything else. It is a feeding table for at least half a dozen species right now. If I hadn't have planted it, perhaps these bees would be on the Spanish needles, but given a choice, they largely ignore it. That's true for the butterflies I have right now as well. My yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Brunfelsia grandiflora), a nonnative flowering shrub, is also the preferred nectar source for a great many things. It is the only plant being visited by the red admirals and the miner bees and it is the only plant I've observed the various skippers on. A few days ago, I watched at least a half dozen different species of butterflies nectaring on it. Other flowers in my yard cannot compete with it as a food source.
We plant things in a living landscape to be used by something and we can't expect that everything we plant will get used by every species of wildlife that we hope to share our lives with. That makes no ecological sense, Diversity is always an important concern.
The same is true for foliage. Over the past few days, monarch butterflies have found my landscape with a vengeance. I've been growing native (and a few nonnative) milkweeds in my nursery - Hawthorn Hill, and the large numbers of milkweed plants that I have here will soon be eaten to the soil line. That sort of damage is what we plant for if we are someone interested in a living landscape.  Nurseries in the big box stores routinely use a systemic pesticide to thwart herbivory on their plants as if perfect foliage was the ultimate goal of a thriving landscape. Systemic pesticides are insidious as they remain in the plant for weeks or months and kill everything that might have the audacity to feed on them. Somewhere, it seems that many of us are taught that our plants need to have perfectly formed leaves; that leaf damage is something we should try to prevent and that it somehow marrs the plants that we have added. It is the concept of "perfection" that has created a good deal of the problems we face in making landscapes a place for everything.
A living landscape demonstrates that it is alive when our plants get chewed on. Caterpillars of butterflies and moths can be voracious feeders, but the plants they feed on have hundreds of thousands of years of built-in adaptations to this. My milkweeds, for example, will bounce back quickly and the monarchs will return when they do. I look with excitement for evidence that I have leafcutter bees as well. They are not always visible in my landscape, but the patterns they cut out of the foliage on some of my plants shows that they are present. Like everything else in nature, they are particular about which plants they use. The scalloped leaves are mostly on my thinner-leaved woody plants. In my landscape, they routinely pick on my small silk bay (Persea humilis) and my Carolina silverbell (Halesia carolina). They're not the only plants they use, but they return to these two specimens repeatedly.
Foliage, like flowers, is meant to be fed on. It is part of the great chain of life and we should welcome it. I do anyway. As the months have now progressed into a second year here in my new yard, the diversity of life that surrounds me here is exponential to what was here when I moved in. My plant choice have been largely purposeful as has my management. A living landscape does not just happen by benign neglect. That approach can work to a limited extent, but our results will always be limited.