It’s very important to mulch your trees and your shrubs. There’s three soil conditions that can be simply avoided by mulching. One is drying out and becoming like a desert. The other is having sitting puddles all the time.
And the last one is diversity of soil life. All of those things are really important for your plant health, and they help avoid compaction happening, which is really, really damaging and the surest way to get weeds. Much also does a cool thing that it keeps water in the area. It keeps plant roots moist, which is really great.
Disease suppression, water collection. There are a lot of types of mulch that can help you out. Native hardwood mulch is generally a really kind of easy one to go with, but you want to stay away from dyed mulches. They’re not good for plant roots, and brand new mulch. That pulls a lot of the nitrogen up during its decomposition process.