The Mulch Mirage: How a Billion-Dollar Industry is Suffocating Our Gardens
By Steve Mydelski | Natchez Glen House
Mulch Has Become a Lie
There’s a quiet betrayal happening across gardens in America. It hides beneath a surface that’s been bagged, dyed, and sanitized: mulch. Once a simple, organic ally in cultivating soil and nurturing plants, it’s now a billion-dollar industry of slick marketing, industrial waste, and horticultural misinformation. And worst of all—it doesn’t work.
As a garden designer, I’ve seen it countless times. I build gardens from the ground up, using compost, decomposed leaf matter, and other local organic materials to create rich, living soil. But months later, I’ll return and find that a landscape contractor has drowned it all beneath three inches of pine bark mulch. Why? Because they were told it’s the “right thing to do.”
What follows is the truth. Not the industry line. Not what sells. But what grows.
What Mulch Used to Be: Decay, Fertility, Life
The word “mulch” first appeared in English in the 1650s, derived from the Middle English molsh, meaning moist and soft. It referred to decaying matter—leaf litter, compost, rotting straw—materials that were part of the natural cycle of fertility. The ancient Egyptians used straw as mulch. Indigenous cultures in the Americas used stone or brush. French market gardeners in the 18th century used straw mulch around strawberries to suppress weeds and improve yield. In each case, mulch was alive—something that decomposed into soil and served a purpose rooted in biology.
Today’s mulch? It’s sterile. It’s dead. And it’s industrial.
What Mulch Has Become: Chips, Dye, and a Corporate Lie
Modern commercial mulch is made from one thing: waste.
After fresh lumber trees are felled—often for construction—the leftover bark and wood is chipped, trucked to processing centers, dyed in petroleum-based colorants, bagged in plastic, and sold in big-box stores. That mulch can sit for up to two years before you even lay it on your garden.
And the industry isn’t shy about it—because it works. Not for your plants, but for their pockets. In 2023 alone, the U.S. mulch industry brought in approximately $1.86 billion. That’s not landscaping. That’s business.
The True Cost: Mulch That Kills Soil
Let’s be honest. Here’s what dyed pine or hardwood mulch actually does in your garden:
• Holds excessive moisture around the crown of perennials, promoting fungal disease like botrytis.
• Suppresses soil fertility—not just weeds. Pine bark, in particular, acidifies already alkaline soils and throws off microbial balance. Seeds don’t germinate not because the mulch is effective—but because the soil is becoming inhospitable
Breaks down poorly: Unlike compost, aged leaf mold, or straw, dyed mulch doesn’t decompose into usable organic matter for soil life. It just sits there.
• Fails at weed suppression after just 4 to 6 weeks. After that? More mulch. More bags. More sales.
I’ll argue this: if you see weed pressure in a garden, that may be a sign your soil is alive. A sterile, weed-free bed might just mean the earth is struggling.
How Far Did That Mulch Travel? And at What Cost?
Let’s follow one truckload of mulch:
• Wood chips from Franklin, Tennessee get shipped to a processing facility in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
• They’re dyed, bagged, then trucked to retail shelves in Nashville—about 302 miles round trip.
• That distance burns roughly 50 gallons of diesel, emitting over 1,120 pounds of CO₂ into the atmosphere—all to spread dead chips over soil.
Now multiply that by thousands of trucks, every spring. Mulch is not only failing your garden—it’s heating the planet to do it.
Aesthetics Over Function—The Garden is Not a Painting
Perhaps most egregious of all is this: modern mulch has become about looks. It’s no longer horticulture. It’s decoration. A glossy, black-dyed bark bed in front of a home has become shorthand for “tidy landscape.” But it’s not beautiful. Not to me. Not to the soil. Not to the plants gasping beneath it.
When mulch becomes more important than plant health, we’ve lost the plot.
What to Use Instead: Return to the Organic
If mulch is to have a place in the garden, it must return to its roots—literally:
• Shredded leaf litter
• Well-aged compost
• Decomposed hardwood fines from local arborists
• Straw or hay (free of weed seed)
• Aged manure
• Composted food waste or spent crop matter
These materials don’t just sit on top. They break down. They build structure. They encourage microbial life. They invite worms. They become the soil.
Mulch should be a process, not a product. It should mirror what happens on the forest floor, not what’s bagged behind the hardware store.
Reclaim Your Garden—Refuse the Bag
You don’t need mulch to make your garden look good. You need plants that thrive. Soil that breathes. Microbes that feed your roots and cycle nutrients. You need to observe, not just cover up.
So here’s what I’m asking:
• Designers: stop specifying dyed mulch in your plans. Specify soil-building organics instead.
• Contractors: learn to build soil, not just cover it.
• Homeowners: take back control. Say no to the bag. Say yes to compost. To mess. To life.
If the mulch you’re using doesn’t make your peonies grow better—why are you using it?
Conclusion: Mulch Is Not a Look—It’s a Life Process
The word “mulch” has been hijacked. It no longer means what it once did. But we can take it back. Mulch should mean something soft, moist, and fertile. Something that grows things. Not something that suffocates them.
Because the garden isn’t a backdrop. It’s alive. And if we really love our plants—we’ll stop burying them in plastic bags of dead bark.