A healthy Xeriscape includes things your children will be happy to tell you are totally gross.
You’ll find creatures in a Xeriscape that won’t win any beauty contests. But those mooshy, slimy, gucky things are beneficial.
Take maggots. You can’t get much grosser than a maggot. They may look yucky, but they arrive in your garden with a mission. Consider the lowly, wormlike larva (the polite word for a maggot) of the hover fly. Its light-green body blends with plant colors as it crawls around looking for aphids. Yum. After eating up a bucketload of undesirables, it becomes a hover fly. Its mission: Make more maggots.
A hover fly looks like a bee. Another visitor actually is a bee, one with an interesting habit. Not all bees are hive dwellers. This one, the leaf-cutter bee, is a bachelor (rather, a bachelorette) who cuts neat round holes on the edges of leaves for nesting. This doesn’t damage the leaf much, and the bee pollinates flowers in the process. So, let her be.
A healthy soil should be full of wiggly creatures that live to promote the health of your landscape. A healthy army of earthworms will dredge happily through the dirt, creating “organic matter.” Mourn when your shovel or hoe turns up half a worm. You’ve lost a golden goose. (Contrary to folklore, you don’t get two earthworms if you cut one in half; the tail end dies, and the head end might.)
Take a peek under a leaf. You may see tiny white dots hanging off tinier stems. The dots are lacewing eggs. The eggs will hatch, and tiny monsters with vicious jaws and voracious appetites will emerge. They eat anything they see, including their own kind. They hatch on those little stems to reduce the opportunities for sibling murder.
Family values aside, lacewing larvae are deadly when it comes to aphids. And eventually they transmogrify into lovely, gentle, half-inch long, light-green insects with transparent, lacy wings, and they feed on pollen and nectar. A symbol of hope for every parent.
You will probably find yourself face-to-face with a spider if you garden much. Just walking through the garden you may find that a spider has woven its web across the path. Don’t be alarmed. Step back to admire the spinner’s handiwork, which can be visually stunning. And keep in mind its benefits to a Xeriscape. Colorado State University’s Cooperative Extension identifies spiders as one of the gardener’s most effective biological controls for insect pests.
Xeriscape gardeners try to use few chemicals to avoid pollution, and minimize artificial intrusions into their landscapes. Take heart from the buzz in your garden. Some great pesticides are crawling and wiggling out there right now. Many of the gross-looking creatures in a Xeriscape can help you achieve your gardening goals.
David Winger is a water-conservation specialist with Denver Water.
