Naturalist to deer: You win this round
I’m struck by the tendency of outdoor apparel catalogs to feature squeaky-clean models, devoid of all dirt, not a hair out of place, walking hither and yon in a state of hygienic perfection.
Seed and garden catalogs look the same. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the good folks at Burpee don’t seem to get dirt-covered, either. But even more than the people in these catalogs, I marvel at the picture-perfect gardens and yards they attend. Their flowering shrubs burst with copious blooms. Their tomatoes hang plump on the vine. Their trowels look so shiny you could use them to serve apple pie.
I don’t know about your place, but my yard and garden, and the tools that maintain them, look more like they’ve been through a war. The truth is, they have. Their enemies: ravenous deer, Arctic weather and boulder-strewn, trowel-bending dirt.
Somewhere in this gardening universe, people don’t wake up in fear of these adversaries. In the Northeast they do, because to maintain a garden or yard in this region is to push your big rock up the hill just as Sisyphus did, knowing full well it’s going to roll back down and land on your head.
Examples?
A walk around the yard on a recent Sunday offered plenty to this glutton for punishment.
We’ll start with the rhododendrons. Several in the yard appear to have been killed by wind and cold. Another suffers from badly split branches caused by one particularly heavy snowfall last month. Other yard trees also damaged in that storm include a flowering dogwood, a redbud and a Bradford pear. I can’t wait for another warm Sunday, so I can sever their snapped limbs and goop tar-like pruning sealer all over these trees and myself.
Moving on to the numerous conifers I have nurtured from seedlings, they’ve been beaten up by antlers and teeth. Rutting white-tailed deer bucks, I discovered, had celebrated their virility by tearing into several four-foot-high Douglas firs at the edge of the woods. Thrashing them with their antlers, the deer had snapped off half their branches before rubbing off bark on their trunks.
A month or so later, more deer moseyed by and chewed off most of their needles.
And the variegated euonymus? Trellised to climb up the side of the house, bringing joy to all those who beheld it?
A gale-force wind blew it down in the night. It lay heaped on itself, like a squirrel nest blown out of a tree. Three days or so later, when the wind finally calmed, I put it out of its misery by cutting it off at the ground.
The patio is frost-heaved. My transplanted periwinkle didn’t make it through winter. I think I’ll go eat worms.
Spring’s on the way, and if hope springs eternal, my gardening attitude should improve when the dandelions rear up and threaten to swallow the yard. Even if it does, I’ve decided against purchasing a new batch of plants for the deer to ingest and next winter’s harsh weather to ravage.
Let the bucks rub their antlers on somebody else’s fir trees for a while. This spring, anyway, I’m burned out.
Naturalist Rick Marsi, a member of the Susquehanna Group, is a journalist, public speaker and leader of eco-tours. His book of favorite nature columns is Wheel of Seasons, available at www.rickmarsi.com. ©2013 Rick Marsi