Deciduous Trees and Leaves

This time of year always reminds me why I plant deciduous woody plants instead of evergreen ones.  So many folks here in Florida seem to want to forget that this part of the state is temperate - not tropical.  Planting a hedge of evergreen plants is a wonderful way to create hiding cover for the songbirds I have designed my landscape for but it's the deciduous ones that do everything else they need.  Deciduous trees and shrubs are self-mulching.  The leaves they shed this time of year enrich the soil and this mulch decays over time and provides for the invertebrates that so many birds rely on in winter.  Mulches are supposed to decay.  All of the nutrients that trees and shrubs absorb during the growing season are cast off in winter and are returned to the soil to provide them again during the growing season.  It's true that woody plants keep some of those nutrients inside their trunks and branches before they set their leaves downward, but the rest is shed.  These nutrients are slowly released over time and they feed earthworms, fungi and the bacteria critical to a plant's wellbeing.  In turn, the invertebrates - worms and other lifeforms without backbones, are a critical food for a wide diversity of birds.  At this time of year, there are virtually no caterpillars feeding on foliage.  The food that some  birds depend on are just beneath the leaf litter.  Birds such as overbirds, thrushes, and worm-eating warblers are only attracted to areas of leaf litter.  Beneath a woodland mulched with decaying leaves they can be seen flipping leaves over looking for invertebrates.  They are not at feeders and they are not foraging in the cqanopy of trees and shrubs.  

I also plant deciduous woody plants because they go leafless this time of year.  The increased sunlight that finds its way to the understory is critical to so many of my flowering plants that would not flower otherwise.  Most of the species I've planted cannot prosper in high levels of summer sun, but they also can't flower without a lot of sun in winter and early spring.  I once planted a red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) beneath a small group of deciduous trees before they were anything resembling a tree.  For the next several years, this poor unfortunate tree leafed out in the spring and abruptly lost all of its foliage within the next three weeks.  It did this for several years until the trees it was planted beneath got some stature.  That buckeye is still alive 30 years later, it flowers each spring and produces nuts.  It needed sun, just not full sun during the heat of summer.  I have planted a red buckeye here in this landscape, but I did not make the mistake of not giving it protection during the summer.  I have anchored my landscape with one large canopy tree - a basswood (Tilia americana) and a few shorter trees, but the red buckeye and the silky camelia (Stewartia malacodendron) are in full sun right now, but shaded in summer.  This is what they need.  

Some folks rake the leaves off of their landscape and treat them as a nuisance.  I add them on purpose for the great value they provide. Consider doing the same if your goal is to create habitat for birds.