OH, DEER THE FIRST

Bambi & equally destructive friend

            That Bambi is so cute. What kind of monster doesn’t love Bambi?

            Answer: anyone whose landscaping becomes a collection of flower- and foliage-denuded sticks the morning after the Bambster and a herd of his closest friends mosey through.

            In all fairness, it’s not Bambi’s fault. As suburbia expands, humans insert themselves into deer territory without making any accommodation for the original residents. Left to their own devises… (Is it “devises” or “devices”? “Devises” fits the meaning better, but people say “devices.” I switch back and forth. Please advise.) Anyway. Left to cope with this environmental sea-change on their own (how’s that?)—since they aren’t the ones with the bulldozers, the poisons, the dogs and the guns—the deer sensibly adapt. Some move on, the rest move in. And why not? Landscapers seem maddeningly slow to recognize that instead of providing pleasant outdoor spaces for people to live and play, they are actually building bovine buffeterias. (No, deer don’t technically fall into the bovine class, but consider this: cows are ruminants too. I just couldn’t pass up the alliterative opportunity.)

Dwarf Indian hawthorn, a.k.a. deer candy

            When Tim and I started working in St. James Plantation in Southport, NC, 14 years ago, the preferred landscape contractors had a complement of about 20 different shrubs they used. All the damn time. (We got so we could reliably identify one company’s work solely by the presence of star anise—Illicium anisatum—a nondescript sort of shrub whose only advantages are that deer refuse to touch it and you can’t kill it with a backhoe.) About 30% of this meager palette topped the deer-depredation charts: Indian hawthorn, pittosporum, euonymus, aucuba, azalea and camellia. Occasionally, one of the more imaginative designers would toss in some daylilies and/or roses—for dessert, I assume. Other de rigueur deer tempters included hydrangea and loropetalum, whose tender new growth nocturnal grazers simply adore.   

'Happy Returns' daylily, a.k.a. deer candy

            Not that landscapes improved all that much once the deer-light dawned for many of our colleagues: hawthorn and pittosporum were out, aspidistra and ornamental grasses—neither of which contribute to stunning four-season foundation plantings—came in.

            But I digress. Tim and I signed up to speak to the local DAR chapter at their March meeting. I asked the program chair what topic she’d like us to natter on about: Revolutionary-era garden plants still in use today? A riff on colonial potagers? Herbs used as medicines by our forebears? “Any of those would be very nice,” she said. “But what we could really use is a list of deer-proof plants.”

              Oh. Okay. We can do that.

          Brainstorming for an hour one Saturday afternoon (putting off house-cleaning again), the intrepid Fitzes came up with dozens of candidates across the spectrum of annuals, bulbs, perennials, groundcovers, vines, shrubs, trees, herbs and ornamental grasses. Frankly, once we got rolling, we were amazed how many plants met our criteria.

          A caveat before continuing: Nothing—NO THING—is deer-proof. The gentle foragers will eat anything—ANY THING—when facing starvation. Resistance is the best we can hope for. A few winters ago, the ornamental cabbages and kales coloring our clients' containers got nibbled down to nubs, to Tim’s and my utter amazement and dismay. Then there were the full and shapely 25-gallon spiny-foliaged lusterleaf hollies (Ilex latifolia) we planted just before Christmas one year. We returned to the site after New Year’s to find them leafless as far up as our scrubby deer could reach, leaving only ridiculous-looking pom-poms at the tops. (We replaced them with wax myrtles, at appreciable cost to the business.)

            The point is, keep your expectations low and you’ll be fine.

 

            Deer-resistant flora share certain morphological characteristics.

1.     Plants whose sap resembles latex (viscous, white, sticky) reliably repel grazers. Examples include Confederate jasmine, any Euphorbia, alyssums, butterfly weed, many sedums and Sandankwa viburnum (V. suspensum).

Sticky-sapped Confederate jasmine

     Latex-y Euphorbia hybrids

'Ascot Rainbow' & 'Blackbird'

2.    Another resistance trait is strong scent (not necessarily fragrance, mind you). This category encompasses almost all the culinary herbs, marigolds, lantanas, sages, agastaches, alliums, catmints, wax myrtles, pines, cedars and the like. 

Fight 'em with smell--

       'Copper Canyon' marigolds...

...and pineapple & Mexican bush sages

 

3.   Thorns and spines act as deterrents, especially when they poke out of leaves, as they do in a pair of my favorite ornamental solanums, S. pyracanthum and S. naranjilla, a.k.a. bed-of-nails. Pyracantha, barberries, prickly pear—or indeed any cactus—agaves, dasylirions and rugosa roses discourage any outside interference, ruminant or human. (A note of sympathy: regular rose thorns pose no problems Bambi and pals: they just nip off the tasty blooms.)

Bed-of-nails' foliar defenses

             A forbidding line-up

of agave, prickly pear & dasylirion

 

4.    Fuzzy, raspy, fibrous and/or leathery leaves fall low down on the deer hit parade. Think evergreen oaks; many of the little-leaved hollies (Ilex crenata and I. vomitoria) as well as the super-spiny ones, like ‘Carissa’ and ‘Rotunda’; junipers and most other conifers; artemisias and lambs-ears; lantana; mature loropetalum; hollyhocks; leatherleaf and ‘Chindo’ viburnums (V. rhytidophyllum, V. awabuki ‘Chindo’); most succulents; yuccas; and any grass-like plant (although not necessarily the flowers thereof, as daylily lovers learn to their sorrow).

               'Blue Pacific' junipers

 do a number on Bambi's tender mouth

Lambs-ears don't please the palate either

 

5.  Deer have enough smarts to avoid poisonous plants: you should reciprocate by seeking them out—that is, if your pets and children are beyond the put-everything-in-their-mouths phase. Daffodils qualify, as do most ornamental solanums, lantanas, rhubarb foliage, artemisias and oleander. 

...as are oleanders

Daffodils are poisonous in all their parts...

Enough for today. I’ll be posting more (plus many more pictures) on the subject as the week rolls on and our date with the DAR draws nearer.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                            Kathy

BREAKING GROUND

            Been an interesting week. And I mean that in a good way, not in the Chinese-curse sense of “May you live in interesting times, snark, snark.”

            Know that old saw about not being able to teach old dogs new tricks? It’s totally bogus, and I have proof—the queen of the neo-Luddites learned how to prepare cyber-slides for Power Point presentations. She not only understood the process, she enjoyed doing it. Yes, I mentioned this little accomplishment last post, but I’ve worked on it, and refined my technique since then. I whipped out two different sets of slides for the pair of clubs Tim and I had the privilege of addressing this week with an absolute minimum of angst and/or fury.



Power Point presentation # 1
(not shown due to technical difficulties)



            Those who have witnessed my tortured relationships with machines won’t believe things went so swimmingly.

            There was one tense moment when I somehow managed to lose everything—stupid Microsoft—just as the “Jeopardy!” theme music came up. My resident geek rushed in and hit the “restore” button (or something like that), saving the presentation and my half-hour with Alex Trebek. (Actually, it’s only 22 minutes with Alex: the other eight, relentlessly cheerful people try to sell me cars, prescription drugs, furniture, mufflers for the car and eggs. Does strident advertising sell anything to anyone?)

            Our first outing, on Wednesday morning, was the St. James Service Club. Unfortunately, their spanking-new Community Center hasn’t worked out all its bugs yet, especially where the electrics are concerned. So our inaugural Power Point presentation had to wait. No worries, Tim and I belong to the tiny minority of Americans who fear death more than public speaking. We get a little Donny-and-Marie shtick going on, and actually have a good time talking to groups. For St. James, we just followed the outline without the pictures.



Power Point presentation # 2,
a smashing success



            In Boiling Spring Lakes on Thursday, however, the Garden Club had the necessary technology up and running. Having big pictures to point at worked really great, I thought—kind of fun. Our computer-enhanced presentation was well-received. The amorphous disaster I feared never happened. Cool.

            Thursday afternoon, the rain stopped long enough for me to get outside for a few hours. (The alternative was a nap. Weather-enforced physical inactivity has been driving me nuts, so I opted for staying awake.)

           

Started out by sawing the four lowest limbs off the Japanese snowbell (Styrax japonicus) on the corner of our house, to keep them from beaning Tim when he mows. That’s our main tree-pruning criteria: if a branch whacks either of us in the head more than once or twice, it’s history. In the front yard, our Sargent’s crabapple and ‘Natchez’ crape will be receiving similar ministrations soon, too.  

After hauling the severed limbs to the lot next door, I dumped the dead stuff out of the last three summer pots along the sidewalk and moved them. I’ve envisioned a blueberry patch in that bed, to be planted in another five or six weeks. One thing I’ve learned about myself from vegetable gardening: if it’s out of sight, it’s likely to be out of mind as well. The potted cucumber vine by the front door and the lettuces and beans on the back deck got more attention than anything else I grew last year, pickleworms, army worms, and all. I shall capitalize on this knowledge.

Pots emptied and moved, I turned to the main event—marking out the new bed along the north side of our property.



The new bed,
viewed from the east

 Burdened with a succession of town governments with delusions of grandeur and led by flimflammers, Oak Island recently completed its top-of-the-line sewer system, so high-tech and complicated, rumor has it that ours is only the second like it in the world. (The first is alleged to be somewhere in Sweden.) This is lovely in theory. What the town fathers glossed over is that there’re only 8200 of us to cough up the requisite 150 million dollars. Can you spell “kick-back” and “overrun”? Long story short, hooking up to this Rube-doggle left Tim, me and our next-door neighbors, the Fraziers, with a 40-foot long and ten-foot wide sand pit. What better place for a lovely blended border of some of my experimental specimens—red buckeye (Aesculus pavia), sweetheart tree (Euscaphis japonicus), maybe seven sons tree (Heptacodium miconiodes)—this year’s Great Sunflower Project ‘Lemon Queens,’ vines like Malabar spinach and hyacinth bean, veggies and fruits?



The new bed,
viewed from the south



On Thursday afternoon, I broke ground. With my shovel, I drew an outline in the sand of a 24-by-seven-foot oblong running west from the houses toward the street. Finally satisfied with the shape, I dug out a little trench around the edges. Then I retired to the other side of our property to scrabble around in the pile of spare flagstones we’ve accumulated over the years, loading the wheelbarrow with likely candidates for a path through the bed between our yard and Fraziers. Once the stones were placed to my liking, I began cleaning up the edge, cutting roots, pulling out grass and weeds and the odd rock. By five o’clock, the knees of my overalls and my gloves were wet through, and the knees on my legs and my hands were thoroughly chilled—time to quit for the day.

I’m pleased by what I got done. I meant to be out there today, but was prevented by a kerfuffle with the town’s Water Department in the morning and, after lunch, the absolute necessity of cleaning our house before a representative from the Health Department shows up with a clipboard and a disapproving glare. Well, there’s tomorrow, complete with good forecast. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks for dropping by. Stay tuned.

                                                                         Kathy