The instinct to clean up the yard every fall is hard to resist: rake every leaf, cut every brown stem, remove every dead flower head, and make the garden look tidy before winter arrives. Your neighbors may appreciate the neat landscaping, but the bees, butterflies, moths, and other beneficial insects that spent summer in your garden may have a different opinion. Many pollinators don’t disappear when cold weather arrives—they spend winter hidden in leaves, soil, dead stems, wood, and other places gardeners routinely remove during fall cleanup. The good news is that creating a pollinator-friendly fall garden doesn’t require letting your entire property become an overgrown mess. A few deliberately untidy areas can provide winter habitat while the rest of the yard still looks cared for.
