Cages

So back to the deer.  I will try not to let this blog devolve into a perpetual anti-deer rant.  Sometimes I'll rant against rabbits, too.  (Carnage lower to the ground, but carnage still).  Indeed, the two seem to work sometimes in concert.  The deer will aggressively knock over my protective cages, exposing the base of the luckless lilac or aronia to the rabbits' relentless gnawing.  What the deer get from the arrangement I don't know, other than the shared satisfaction of mayhem.

The cages encircle my most vulnerable shrubs, which is to say most of them.  My yard looks like an absurdist plant zoo.  Once-proud viburnum and burning bush, unaccustomed to incarceration, scream silently at the injustice of it.  It feels wrong.  Yet their very survival depends on it.  The deer pressure south of Third St. has gotten so bad in the last 5 years that they will ravage plants they never used to touch:  forsythia, rose of sharon, barberry, coneflower.  But for a very few holdouts (spirea, boxwood), everything is fair game for the deer, and so I keep building cages, contributing generously to profits at Lowes and Rural King, where I get the wire fencing.

Cage prototypes have come and gone over the years (the variables are greater than you might think), new models replacing the ones the deer have overpowered, and I'm still not confident in the ones I currently have.  The greatest success has come in the centerpiece vegetable garden, essentially a plant prison surrounded by eight-foot fencing dug six inches into the ground to thwart burrowers.  It's so well fortified that even I have a hard time getting in.  Within are an asparagus bed, fall-planted garlic, and assorted vulnerable perennial flowers.  The first two are fairly deer-proof, but I keep them enclosed just in case.  It just takes one rogue deer with a taste for asparagus to ruin my week.  Also within is a rehab center for shrubs so brutalized by deer attack that they need extra protection.  The gratitude and relief in that corner of the enclosure are tangible--I like to just stand there and enjoy my lordly benevolence.

Let's be clear: the deer are not here just for an occasional nibble.  I would gladly grant them that.  No, their mission is to destroy.  They go at my shrubs with hooves, antlers, and the full force of their considerable bodyweight.  Once they snapped an 8-foot dawn redwood right in half, just for spite.  No tree under 4 inches diameter is safe, so among the shrub-protecting cages are black-plastic bark guards on all the young trees.   

It's not a pretty site, this plant penitentiary of black plastic and steel.  Where once I had a promising natural landscape well on its way to maturity, I now have something entirely different.  Fine in passive February, perhaps, but as the shrubs leaf out and the new growth chafes against the steel caging, it seems everyone's frustrated:  plants, deer, and gardener.  Something there is that doesn't love a wall, says Frost (whom my grandfather almost ran over once, probably unintentionally), and he could have been talking about cages, too, of course.  And so I cling to my perverse vision of a cageless future, in which my plantings, like the chickens of enlightened poultry farmers, can roam free.  It's the least they deserve.