Real estate inspectors call it a "condition conducive to wood-destroying insects" when you have wood-to-ground contact *against your house*.

If your *house* has wood touching the ground, you cannot sell it with FHA or VA financing until you correct the condition, but termites in the yard or garden are so common & so unproblematic that the inspectors don't even check for them.

Termites live in the soil, venturing out to eat & then returning to the soil for water.
If there's no contact between the wood & the soil, they "can't get there from here".

If wood mulch is piled against the house, it makes a handy little bridge for termites to march across on their daily commute.

My experience has been that the wood chips in the trimmers' trucks comes from trees & brush that was growing too close to utility lines, not from individual homeowners who had trees removed for whatever reason.

Yeah, around here there are wood frame stucco houses that have wood all the way to the ground. They almost all have termites, and after they have to be treated, the insurance companies demand that they have the wood cut 8 inches off the ground. Most of these houses were built in the 50's thru the 70's. By the time they got to my neighborhood, still had frame houses, but they had caught on, and these are one very thick slabs, and the wood is not touching the ground at all.

I don't believe it's even legal to build a woodframe house in Florida now, is it?

I know my neighbor made the mistake of putting store bought mulch up against the foundation where his hedges are......he paid by having to have an outside wall removed, the termites killed, and the wall reconstructed. I'm glad he told me about it....I'll never mulch up agaist the house. In fact, now I'm wondering if it's o.k. to mulch against the porch, but then it's four feet of concrete away from the foundation, so I guess it should be alright.

In some states, it wouldn't matter at all where the mulch came from, it's just location and opportunity.....