Photo Of The Week: Volcano Mulching

May 1, 2024
Larry Hurley
Gardening How-To, Landscaping
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Piling mulch up against the trunk of a tree is known as volcano mulching. You see this all over, and it’s a bad practice. Over-mulching encourages the tree to send out roots under the mulch instead of in the ground, and this can lead to girdling roots, which can eventually kill the tree. Robert Pavlis in his “Garden Myths” blog, explains this is detail. Pavlis looks at bad garden practices and internet plant mythology, and corrects a lot of misconceptions.

I’m not sure how this style of mulching started. Partly it was to keep grass away from tree trunks so that mowers wouldn’t go in too close and damage the trunk (which I have heard called “lawnmower blight.”).

Then, I suspect that commercial landscape firms had contracts to mulch multiple times a year, and applied mulch whether they needed to or not, and the piles just kept growing higher as the mulch didn’t decay as rapidly as anticipated. And then, homeowners copied the landscapers and the landscapers copied each other, and suddenly you have volcano mulching all over the world.

I took this picture in May of 2018, at the Lido, off of Venice, Italy, because I’d already taken about a thousand pictures of the canals. This is authentic volcano mulching, because the mulch is actually lava rock. Who knows, maybe ancient Pompeii was actually buried by an army of crazed landscapers instead of Mount Vesuvius.

Larry Hurley

Larry Hurley worked at Behnke Nurseries from 1984 until the business was composted in 2019, primarily with the perennial department in growing, buying and sales.

Before landing at Behnke’s, he worked as a technician in a tissue culture lab, a houseplant “expert” at a florist shop, and inventory controller at a wholesale nursery in Dallas. With this and that, ten years passed.

When his wife Carolyn accepted a position at Georgetown University, Larry was hired at Behnke’s for the perennial growing department and garden center at Behnke’s Largo location.

In 2021, Larry and Carolyn moved back to Wisconsin to be closer to family and further from traffic. After 37 years in a shaded yard in Maryland, he is happy to have a sunny lot where he can grow all sorts of new perennials, if only he can keep the rabbits at bay. He also enjoys cooking, traveling, and the snowblower.

Volcano Mulching