Any day now, I expect to hear hooves parading across my
roof. Yesterday, while sitting in the living room, I was sure I did hear cloven
clops. The cats heard too; the pounding had woken from their second or third
midmorning nap, and I watched for a brief minute, amused, as they shook off
sleep and swiveled their heads to follow the sound of movement overhead. Then,
remembering the battle at hand, I shot out the back door, shoved my feet into
my gardening Crocs and scurried behind the house.
My house backs into a dirt hill, so I’m taller than the roof
when standing behind the kitchen. As an added bonus, the bricks of the chimney
jut out, Tetris-style, to provide makeshift steps up to the flat asphalt.
Careful this time to clear the gutter that gashed my shin
the week before, I threw my arms around the chimney and launched myself up into
a kneeling position. I led to my feet and brushed the asphalt grit from my
reddened knees. Two randy squirrels were engaged in a game of tag along the
shingled roof ridge. They were not the trespassers I expected, but I
reprimanded them anyway.
“Stay away from my plants!” I shouted, waving my arms above
my head like an enraged gorilla. The squirrels leapt into the top boughs of a
bougainvillea tree and disappeared from sight.
I inspected the collection of plastic and ceramic pots at my
feet. The ripening strawberries appeared unaccosted. The delicate blossoms of
the tomato plants were intact. Relieved, I climbed down the chimney and
commenced my morning perimeter check.
My instinct is to nurture nature, but I’ve recently become
obsessed with protecting my flora from fauna. It’s California’s fault. Plump
grapes, sweet-smelling citrus, artichokes the size of grapefruit – this truly
is the land where everything grows. So I took my recent relocation from muggy,
torrentially wet South Florida to the San Francisco Bay Area as an opportunity to
experiment. Our Florida house had offered a mere patio of container gardening.
I now had almost an entire half-acre at my disposal and a burning desire to
beautify it as best I could. I bought bulbs in bulk at Costco. I swapped seeds
with my new neighbor. I started a mini Jiffy greenhouse and grew mildly
distraught when instructed to “pinch off” the weakest seedlings among my
homegrown darlings. Drought conditions withstanding, this would be the year all
earthy elements coalesced and my callused thumbs glowed green.
My husband and I were a mere two weeks into our new lease
when the welcoming committee stopped by.
“Megan! Megan, come quick! You have to see this!” Matt said,
bursting into the bedroom. I ran after him into the kitchen and then followed
the path of his index finger. It directed to the top of the hill behind the
house where three deer grazed in our neighbor’s yard. They stood about 20 feet
away from the window we peered out of, close enough for our movement to catch
their attention. Their intent stares made me wonder if they questioned the
purpose of the boxy enclosure confining Matt and I, and, if so, whether they
considered themselves the observers or the observed.
From then on, I saw the deer – a doe, a fawn and a juvenile
with a slight limp — almost every day. They seemed to make a daily migration
from the wooded area across the street to either rest under a tree at the top
of the hill behind our house or munch on the neighbor’s overgrown yard.
“Barbara used to say they came by every day at lunch time,”
said Debbie, my seed-swapping friend. “She would work in your back bedroom.”
I emailed Barbara, our landlord, so she would know I had
taken up the daily deer vigil because I too was working from home. But like
Debbie, she seemed merely bemused by my enthusiasm. This puzzled me. They were
women. From California. Weren’t they animal lovers as well?
I began carrying my laptop into the garden so I could
observe the deer as I worked, the camera feature of my cellphone always on
standby should they wander close enough for me to frame. I texted the pictures
to everyone — my parents, my sister, my in-laws, a delighted, 80-year-old
friend back in Florida – and regularly posted them on Facebook.
“My new yard is inexplicably full of woodland creatures.
Should I start singing to them?” I gushed in one post, an album of deer glamour
shots.
Like me, my female Facebook friends were undoubtedly
picturing themselves orchestrating a Technicolor forest sing-along with plump,
warbling bluebirds and dappled-bottom fawns. My male Facebook friends, however,
proved a bit more practical.
“Should grab it and surprise Matt with some jerky,” wrote
Scot.
“Sounds like a recipe for Lyme disease,” my husband
responded.
“They BITE! Throw
something at it!” advised my father-in-law.
Silly boys, I thought. The deer and I were friends. If I
only sang and spoke softly, reassuringly, to the fawn each day, he would surely
curl up under my arm so we could nap together in the grass.
The first to go were the bright yellow tops of the Calendula
officinalis. I awoke one morning to discover a handful of these delightful,
daisy-like flowers had been beheaded in the night. A trail of small brown
pellets remained at the scene as some sort of perverse payment for the
bountiful buffet I had unwittingly provided.
“Please don’t eat the flowers,” I said to the deer, pleading
during their next visit. We gazed deep into each other’s eyes. It was cool. I
knew we had an understanding.
By the time my voracious new neighbors shredded the
brand-new violas, I reasoned it was time for soft warfare; I hoofed it over to
the library. There, among row upon row of gardening books, I unearthed what I
was seeking: a list of proven deer repellants that would gently discourage the
interlopers.
The list ranged from the heavily perfumed (Irish Spring soap
shavings, dryer sheets) to the absurd (lion manure?!). Several of the
suggestions – blood meal and bags of human hair, for example – seemed better
suited to a satanic ritual. One book recommended I collect and then dispense my
own urine around the garden because deer, apparently, don’t appreciate the
scent of human pee.
Short of breaking into the San Francisco Zoo to secure
manure or instructing my husband to relieve himself among the African daisies,
I was open to suggestion. But as Matt had yet to see any garden of mine
actually flourish in correlation to the amount of money I spent on this hobby,
he had requested I keep my trips to the Home Depot garden center at a minimum.
So expensive commercial sprays were out. I settled on soap and fabric softener,
two items our household already possessed in great supply.
Our yard was soon littered with a confetti of bright green
soap and dryer sheets tucked under rocks or fastened to vegetation with
clothespins. Our two-legged neighbors, Debbie included, smiled and offered
encouragement upon noticing the new decorations, but I wondered if they
secretly regretted the lack of an HOA clause explicitly prohibiting such
unorthodox displays.
“It’s just until my in-laws come to visit,” I promised. “I
want them to see how everything grows here.”
True to my word, the soggy soap scraps and limp dryer sheets
were trashed just before my parents-in-law arrived from Florida. The so-called
remedies’ repelling powers had proved minimal to nonexistent. But I would be
resilient, I silently vowed.
I progressed to twine, 1,000 feet of the coarse brown string
looped around trees and strategically placed tomato stakes bordering the
backyard, creating what I imagined was an impenetrable barrier around the
begonias. Sure, the twine was thin, but perhaps its sudden, mysterious
appearance would be enough to confuse the already skittish deer. Days went by
without attack and, feeling smug, I informed my skeptical husband and
houseguests of my success.
Then I noticed the cats. They were staring intently out the
kitchen window, eyes widened as they followed the fawn methodically chewing his
way through the garden. He had already decapitated the columbines, delicate
pink blossoms Costco brazenly advertised as “Deer Proof.” That wasn’t fair. Those were off limits!
Hadn’t the fawn read the bulb packaging? I ran outside, vaulting over a short
stone wall as I rounded the back of the house.
“What are you doing?!” I yelled, waving a fly swatter in
what I hoped was a mildly threatening manner. “Get off my lawn!”
The fawn didn’t even bother to trot his way out. He simply
turned his rump toward me and walked, glacially slow, to the Great Wall of
Twine. Then he ducked under this oppressive barrier and continued munching on
the other side. As soon as I turned my back, he ducked back under the rope and
returned to snack on my grass. I yelled again and he left again, but I knew it
was pointless. I retreated and stomped over to the stone wall. I jumped down,
smacking my head on the hummingbird feeder in the process. Sticky red nectar
speckled my clothes. I felt defeated, on the verge of tears. Naturally, I
turned to social media to voice my discontent.
“I loved my neighbors, the deer — until they ate all the
blooms off my flowers,” I wrote, whining as best as a status update allows.
“Now we’re on the outs.”
This time, however, I did not particularly appreciate the
responses.
“For cryin’ out loud, Megan — LOL — plant some flowers in
your ‘front’ yard — or better yet, not at all — you have deer in you backyard
close enough to kiss!! how cool is this?? just buy a damn plant and keep it in
the window sill…. xo.” wrote Dee.
“Kiss?!” Didn’t she know these vermin carried Lyme disease?!
Determined not to surrender, I forged on in a frenzy
bordering on mania. I turned to crop circles of blood meal and tufts of my own
hair yanked from a hairbrush and then stuffed under rocks. I splurged on a
Renuzit Air Freshener dispenser to create an invisible force field of “Fresh
Laundry” scent around the lemon tree. I planted French marigolds for their
heady aroma. They would become my sentinels of scent to ward of roving
marauders.
It was while preoccupied with all these ridiculous deer
remedies, however, that I inadvertently exposed myself to another, wholly
unexpected adversary.
Matt and I were headed out to dinner when he indicated the
sad state of a calendula planted on the
fringes of the flowerbed. The poor
plant appeared parched, deflated and downright melancholy. I resolved to water
it when we returned, but I never got the chance; the entire plant was
noticeably missing just a few hours later, the entrance to a tunnel beside it
providing the only clue to its abduction.
All evidence indicated a hungry gopher had had his way with the flower,
a theory solidified days later when routine surveillance revealed a furry
little head cautiously peeking out from the bed.
The cats and I observed this new perp from the safety of the
living room window (“Make sure to tell her gophers can carry the Black Plague!”
my well-meaning sister-in-law, an epidemiology expert, had advised Matt).
Admittedly, the gopher was kind of cute with oversized buckteeth and a nose
that twitched whenever he caught whiffs of a pleasing scent. But then I
imagined the rodent straddling that innocent calendula in an underground lair,
lustily grinding his yellowing front chompers as he plucked petal after petal
from her head, and she writhed in agony.
I now knew a second front had opened in my war on nature.
Before I started my spring planting in earnest, I would require reinforcements.
I drove to Home Depot.
“Most people stick a hose in the hole and flood ‘em out,”
explained a young associate, a self-described gopher expert. “Then they just
hit them with a shovel. But I can tell you’re not the kind of person who would
do that.”
Sheepishly, I agreed.
“Yeah, I don’t want to kill him,” I said. “He’s kind of
cute.”
I settled for a roll of chicken wire and some plastic
fencing. With Matt’s help, I built a garden box enclosure and reinforced the
bottom with a complex network of wire that scratched and scored the backs of my
hands.
Days later, I was sitting in the garden, admiring my
handiwork, when one of the calendulas just outside the new enclosure began
violently shaking. For a second, I watched, mesmerized and confused, as this
once inanimate object danced.
“What black magic is this?!” I wondered.
Then I knew.
“Oh no you don’t!” I yelled, leaping from my chair. Sure
enough, there was a telltale cavity beside the plant.
In a fury of rage, I grabbed a shovel and flung dirt in all
four cardinal directions, following the hole five feet back as it wound through
the garden. This as I yelled all manner of obscenities at the ground.
Not
surprisingly, my impromptu excavation failed to bring the criminal to justice.
I’m not proud of what I did next, but I chalk it up to
extreme frustration, exhaustion and, perhaps, the heat? Before you judge me,
know that I never conspired to actually kill the gopher. I merely wanted to
flush him to the surface so we could tousle, mano-a-mano (mano-a-rodento?), on
a fair playing ground. Then I would simply load his hogtied, furry little butt
into the car and drive 10 miles away to deposit him among greener pastures –
namely, someone else’s yard.
I thrust the hose into what was left of the hole, opened the
spigot full blast and grimaced.
I guess I expected water to explode from a multitude of
tunnel entrances hidden throughout the flowerbed – kind of like it did on that
golf course when Bill Murray attempted to drown the “Caddyshack” gopher. But
that’s not what happened. Instead, the water simply back-flowed from the hole
and soaked my shoes. The gopher did not emerge, and I have not seen him since.
As for the deer, it was when they devoured the contents of
the container garden on the front patio – an area my landlord had labeled as
safe – that I finally resorted to the roof. One by one, I heaved heavy pots of
chomped tomato seedlings and devoured strawberry plants over my head and onto
the asphalt.
I now keep a bucket on the roof so that any rain collected
might mitigate the need to haul up a full watering can. And I usually remember
to wear pants when climbing so I don’t cut my legs on the gutter or collect
bits of roof gravel in the skin of my knees.
For the flowerbeds, I concocted an anti-deer potion of cayenne pepper,
minced garlic and rotten eggs. So far, this flower marinade seems effective,
though it has freckled the violas’ smiling faces. It smells not unlike vomit,
so naturally I do too each time I have to unclog the spray nozzle of cayenne
pepper flecks.
My friends and family continue to mock my obsessive
determination. Matt claims I’m fighting a losing battle and has encouraged me
to surrender. But I won’t let their comments deter me. My enemies, my foes, are
animals. Surely I can outsmart a bunch of dumb animals. Right?
With the help of a sign (“Not tonight, deer”) and a deer
effigy (I swear I did not break the figurine’s plastic legs – I found it that
way at a garage sale), the garden box on the ground has managed to keep both
the deer and rodents at bay. But I soon may need to add a roof to the structure
because the cucumber seeds I planted weeks ago have yet to sprout. This time, I
think the culprits may be birds – the warbling, sing-along kind.
