🌿 Garden Confidential: The Fireflies Didn’t Disappear. We Just Forgot How to Garden.
By Steve Mydelski – Natchez Glen House
When I was a kid growing up in a densely packed part of Tampa, Florida, I wanted to see fireflies.
I had read about them, seen drawings of them, heard the name “lightning bug” whispered with wonder. But I didn’t see them. Not once. One day, I asked a neighbor who had lived there much longer than me, “Have you ever seen any fireflies around here?” He paused. Then he said, “We used to. Not anymore.”
I couldn’t have been more than ten years old at the time, but I remember that answer vividly—because even then, I understood what he was really saying: something was gone.
Now, more than 35 years later, I live in a place where fireflies light up the night from May through September. They hover, flicker, and float in a kind of quiet electric joy, winding through meadows, rising from leaf litter beneath trees, flickering across the garden as if it were woven from stars. And they’re here—because the garden is here.
Not a landscape. Not a set of decorative beds. A real garden.
It’s a place filled with perennial structure, tree lines, moisture, organic matter, and complexity. A place that offers cover and food. A place that’s alive all season—not just for 60 days while tomatoes grow in a raised bed, but from early spring to hard frost. This is where fireflies live. This is where fireflies thrive.
And here’s the part that no meme or alarmist headline ever tells you: fireflies are not gone because of mystery, magic, or fate. Fireflies are gone because we replaced gardens with landscapes.
🔥 Landscapes are sterile. Gardens are alive.
We don’t have a firefly problem. We have a gardening problem.
When I see another social media post that says “We are the last generation that will see fireflies,” what I actually hear is: We are the generation that gave up gardening. That forgot what a garden even is. We’ve traded something sacred for something sterile, and now we’re surprised by the result.
We now call a few boxwoods under a window a “garden.” We think a raised vegetable bed that runs from May to July counts as ecological engagement. We look at the narrow strip between a driveway and a wall and decide it needs “landscaping.” But we don’t make gardens anymore. We landscape. We sterilize. We mulch, we border, we edge. We create green buffers that look like nothing, do nothing, and support even less.
Let me be clear: the word garden is being stolen. Hijacked by tidy suburbia. Confused with a commercial product. If what’s planted around your house couldn’t possibly support fireflies, butterflies, bees, or birds—then it is not a garden. It is a landscape.
And this is the tragedy: we’ve blurred the line so much that most people no longer know the difference.
🌾 Gardens are ecological systems, not design accents.
Gardens are places where layers of perennials bloom in succession—through spring, summer, and fall. They’re spaces that hold moisture, offer shelter, and host the full life cycle of creatures we claim to love. They are built to be lived in—by insects, birds, animals, people. They’re messy. They’re beautiful. They change. They require care, not just maintenance.
Landscapes are something else entirely. They are decoration. Usually sterile. Usually short-lived. They are put in to fill a space, not feed anything.
If you don’t see fireflies where you live, it’s not just bad luck or a change in weather. It’s a sign. Fireflies are an indicator species. They show up when everything else is working: moisture levels, plant layering, low light pollution, organic cover, and food availability. When fireflies disappear, it means something foundational has gone missing. And that missing piece is the garden.
🏡 The house deserves a garden. Not a landscape.
The space outside your picture window, beneath your bay window, along your foundation—that is supposed to be the garden. That is your interaction with nature. That is your stage for life. But instead, it’s often filled with hydrangeas and boxwoods that do nothing for the ecosystem. It’s filled with sterile mulch and plastic edging.
We should be ashamed that so much of our built environment leaves no room for life.
If you’re reading this, maybe you’re already a gardener—or you want to be. Maybe you’re somewhere in between, wondering what you could do to bring back the fireflies, the butterflies, the bees. Here’s your answer: Make a garden. A real one. One that grows in layers, lives across seasons, and provides something more than curb appeal.
🛠️ HOA landscapes won’t save us.
I’m tired. Tired of hearing about fireflies disappearing, monarchs disappearing, pollinators disappearing—while watching homeowners associations pay for ornamental petunias and boxwood borders like it’s the answer to anything.
Every suburban development in America should be held accountable for building real gardens—layered perennial gardens of an acre or more, ideally five to fifteen. Real gardens, not the greenwashed nonsense we’ve settled for. Fireflies aren’t an exotic species—they’re the canary in the coal mine of our neighborhoods.
Until we draw the line—until we stop calling landscapes “gardens”—this crisis will continue. And we’ll keep scrolling past viral posts wondering why the world feels emptier.
But I can tell you: it’s not a mystery.
It’s not fate.
It’s not even climate change alone.
It’s because we forgot how to garden. And worse—we forgot that it matters.