When I drive the back roads of the rural Ozarks where I live, my eyes jitter across the edges of the roads. I strain to keep my concentration on my driving. I am not sightseeing or looking for wildflowers. I'm hunting woodchips.

Mixed woodchips! That delightful musty hash of ash twigs and oak leaves, slime molds and fungal hyphae, sawdust and grime. The gardener's joy, the ideal mulch, not least because it can generally be obtained for free—if you can find it.

Mixed hardwood chips are especially good for my favorite plants, fruit trees. Most of the species we grow for fruit evolved as forest-edge plants dwelling in a setting where woody mulch is abundant, fallen leaves and twigs rotting into the soil. In an orchard, we do well to mimic this natural system and provide a woodchip mulch ourselves. Commercial woodchip mulches, though, lack the biological diversity of mixed arborist chips and come in tiny, overpriced plastic bags, so obtaining this free product is critical.

When I lived in St. Louis, getting chips was simple. The city had designated dump spots, so chips for my garden were always available. The biggest obstacle was transportation—I drove a station wagon at the time, not ideal for hauling bulk landscape materials. Still, I made many trips to shovel woodchips into 5-gallon buckets and trash bags. I was never sure how safe it was to ride in an enclosed vehicle with those musty chips, but like many another man carried away by greed, I was ready to sacrifice my health in pursuit of gain.

Now that I live in the Ozarks, I have made myself a cliché and purchased a pickup truck, so transportation is no problem; the real challenge lies in finding my supply here without readymade city facilities. Though I live amidst vast deciduous forests, arborist chips can be surprisingly hard to get. Not every town here maintains compost sites like St. Louis, and for my first six years here I didn't live in otwn anyway. During that period, my calls to arborists, offering a free dump spot for their chips, brought me not a single load; our house was in a remote area where tree crews seldom chip the branches. Most people have space to leave their fallen trees lie out there, and so wood chips are, literally, thin on the ground.

Sometimes, it turns out, crews here just dump chips by the side of the road. Nobody documents these locations for the public, though taking the chips is acceptable—if a person can find them. I have scoured county plat maps trying to locate dump spots, and put in hours of driving back roads. After a few years, I finally identified a few consistent spots, the locations of which I treat with a secrecy otherwise reserved for morel mushroom sites or nuclear launch codes.

As of late summer last year, my expeditions had succeeded, leaving me in the envied position of shoveling pickup-loads of mulch in a Missouri summer. Over many pickup loads, I gradually mulched my whole garden, though the long drive and need to shovel on both ends meant I never really had an excess of chips. Like many another stereotype of wealth, I only kept my haul through constant labor, anxiety, and dedication.

Eventually, we moved to town and I signed up for a service that promises to connect arborists with gardeners. Within a month, somebody had dropped eight yards of fresh oak chips in front of my carport. Arriving home after the delivery, I stood atop a heap of chips six feet tall and at least as wide, feeling like King Croesus. I resisted the impulse to dive into the heap and swim a lap like Scrooge McDuck, but only because my children were already performing the ritual for me.

I am not much of a capitalist. The old moral language about avarice and the evils of the wealthy still resonates with me. But translate that pursuit of gain into a chase for a horticultural waste product, and I become a banal portrait of greed. I am Goldman Sachs, but for the rotting remnants of trees.

No set of values can guarantee a person will live a moral life. Just as an avowed feminist can be a horrible abuser, it is all too easy for me to allow my sustainable-living radicalism to be swallowed by the very covetousness I despise.

Seeking to avoid this fate, I try to slow my gaze and regard the chips themselves. To look and see. Electric yellow slime molds and musky dark rots; ash and elm leaves, fragrant spring tree and cedar; the heartwoods of mulberry and locust. Once as I was half-finished loading my truck, I turned up a pill-shaped white object; about as long as my palm and rubbery, it bounced down the heap. Then more. A nest of snake's eggs buried under my dragon's hoard. They sat dull among the dust as I considered. I covered them over with chips, tossed my shovel in the backseat, and drove away.