Sure if you have a large property, it's good to have so many trees of varying ages and sizes.

If you just have a home in the suburbs with 1/2 acre or less, then just a few trees is preferred, and probably don't want seedlings to be growing to make the area look wild instead of manicured.

In a healthy ecosystem, deer would be eating most of those. A natural forest doesn't have seedlings growing under the canopy of the parent tree.

My suburban Houston lot in those pictures is just under 1/4 of an acre. And while most homeowners might be content to let 4 big trees reign over a sea of turf grass, I have over 25 mature trees and shrubs (and many more on the way). Half of those are from before they stopped logging the land 50 years ago. Most of the younger generation are volunteers. The canopy on the property is about 75% as closed as it can get. The understory is about 50% filled as if can get. It's definitely the "wild look" compared to most of my neighbors. Keeping leaf litter on the ground all year long is practically unheard of in our corner of suburbia.

On my land, seedlings come and go . In wet years they proliferate . Deer eat some and some survive and then the dry years come and most die. These last 10 years have been awful for tree regeneration. We usually have one good year if we are lucky followed by several dry years that kill off the seedlings.I cage them in the wet years to protect them from browsing only to have them disappear in the dry years from lack of water . I have seen this more than once. It is irritating to see my efforts fail.The last couple of years have been good for trees. I do have some that after this wet summer to come ( with the developing strong Midoki El Niño) should be getting strong enough to make it through some dry spells that are coming. I am seeing some three year old trees. This gives me a lot of hope.

The two oceans are "flipping" into a cooling off period and that means more extended droughts for Texas just like in the 50's. More La Niñas then her wet brother. This year I need to cage the best trees and map them. I need to set up an irrigation system that will give me some way to get water to them so I do not loose all of them when the drought worsens . I got lots of babies but I need teenagers and young adults. I have decided to ramp up my efforts and change the formula by adding supplemental water in the heat of the summer..

I was out walking and found two more madrones and some escarpment black cherries, bumela and many red Oaks. . A small twister took some of the old Spanish oaks down but a small one is under what was the parent tree. I am hoping that something might come up from the roots.

I'm far enough west that we had to solve the water problems just to survive. The trees we see spreading the fastest are mesquite. There are lots of young mesquite all over our valley this year, as well as some unusual plants I've not seen here before (probably because of the wet spring). A lot of seeds will stay dormant for fifty years waiting for a spring like we've had so far.

We don't have wells and we aren't connected to any water system. All of our water comes from rain catchment and our pond. If the situation turns to where that isn't sufficient for a few years in a row, we'll pick up and move south. I hear Guatemala is a gardener's paradise.

Go look out in a patch of cactus. All around my garden you can now see sunflowers blooming up from the middle of prickly pear stands. Why? Because on year I grew sunflowers and I didn't harvest them. The birds and mice collected the seeds. Often the mice will grab some seeds and retreat to a prickly pear patch to eat them in safety. And sometimes they forget a seed. The prickly pear then provides a thorny nursery for the seed and later the seedling.

Nature is a mess, but what a beautiful mess!

That reminds me to move some sunflower seedlings out of my garden by the house.

I would love to see pictures of these messes! Sometimes I feel like I am the only weirdo in suburbia with a messy woods. Even the "native garden" pictures in books and on the Internet tend to be tame, sterile, overly-neat, overly-planned little swaths of wildflower bushes on bark chip mulch. I love the leaf litter and the seedlings and the underbrush and the fallen logs and the mushrooms!