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.

Cruel But Not Cruelest

February only seems like the cruelest month. In fact, it's the self-hating month, eager to be done with itself, propelling us mercifully into March. But what do we find when we suddenly find ourselves in March?  Confusion, that's what.  March brings great dressing challenges, for one thing.  Bundling up in February is the obvious choice, but in March we're either over or under-dressed, sweating or shivering. March is when the colds hit us.  March is when we get ahead of ourselves.

The earth, too, is perplexed and ambivalent.  Soon I'll be watching for its first uncertain ventures into spring.  The life buried deep within will reassert itself, thumbing its green nose at winter's best efforts to bury it.  Even now the sap is rising, and my friends at Hinkle-Garton Farmhouse are busy collecting maple syrup to boil down.  Crocuses first, fragile but insistent, then daffodils, looking at first like bewildered overdressed visitors to a barren planet, only later settling into the emerging green around them.

The poor crocuses will quickly disappear into deer bellies.  But the tan marauders don't eat the crocus foliage, so the bulbs survive, and here we have Exhibit A of a gardener's crazy, desperate faith:  someday, somehow, the deer will move on to happier grazing grounds, and the crocuses will flourish, and my poor garden, likewise tattered, battered, and broken by the deer, will return to itself.  Until then, I am but a guardian, protecting my charges as best I can, watching for that happy day when I can plant fearlessly, at last more gardener than guard.

Next entry, "Cages."  Here's a teaser:  

Welcome, with caveat.

Welcome.  But if you're looking for the musings of a voyeur, you're in the wrong blog.  We all have things we watch.  Television, stocks, our weight.  I watch my yard.  I watch grass grow.  So perhaps this blog will be of limited interest in this fast-paced world of ours, but I hope that maybe a few readers will find something in it.  Mostly, I'm writing to hone my own powers of observation, to record what I see happening out there and what it does to me in here.

"Watch" has another meaning, too, a meaning a bit outdated but vivid still.  A watch was a period of lonely, patient, expectant waiting, often through the night.  Expecting what...the dawn, the Christ, Fortinbras' army?  For me, the gardener, this sense of the word seems especially apt as I begin my blogging in late February, the ground still frozen and new life still but a promise.  

It's a subtle refinement on the word "hope" that I'm looking for here.  Maybe it will become clearer as I write.

And so on to Entry the First, "Cruel But Not Cruelest."