When we say, “fall garden clean-up,” just how clean do we mean? A slightly tongue-in-cheek campaign called “The Pledge to Be a Lazy Gardener,” from the Habitat Network, asks us to think about that in a whole different way than what you might find in the how-to section of ornamental-horticulture books.

Backstory: The Habitat Network collaboration between Cornell Lab of Ornithology and The Nature Conservancy, empowered by a mapping program called YardMap, provides a suite of tools that helps you map, and then manage, your own home landscape ecologically, to be a better habitat style gardener. The information in the maps you create in this citizen-science project helps researchers learn about wildlife interactions in residential landscapes, and more.

We asked Dr. Rhiannon Crain, The Habitat Network project manager, to talk about rethinking fall clean-up from an ecological point of view.