Scatological Blossoms

Scat on my gravel driveway makes me happy.

Scat (the politically-correct way to refer to animal feces – which also masks the street language version) usually means the bobcat or mountain lion (cougar) is back. These animals seem to like pooping on my driveway to mark their territory.

The wonderful result is the deer vanish. They smell the marked territory.

I have not seen any deer for the past week. Today I found a fresh pile of scat on the edge of the driveway.

The beauty of it is that I get more splendor in my garden.

When I first moved here 23 years ago I planted the rockrose ‘Sunset’(Cistus ‘Sunset’) and enjoyed its hot-pink blossoms. The shrub had to be taken out when the stump next to it was ground up into a pile of wood chips. Then three years ago I planted another one. The deer proceeded to eat every flower bud and kept the plant as a half-sphere of foliage. The foliage is nice, but the flowers are spectacular. This week the plant is covered with its crape paper hot-pink petals. Other plants are blooming unlike years before when the deer ate the blossoms and foliage

When I first moved here I put some of those road reflectors that mark highway lanes down the middle of our gravel driveway. (To prove we weren’t entirely country hicks. Of course the two “lanes” would apply only to motorcycles.) The next morning there was a fresh pile of bobcat scat on top of one of the reflectors. A message saying “Hey I was here first. What right do you have to invade my territory?” Just marking its territory, and scaring off the deer.

This winter I found a perfectly intact, fresh deer skeleton with three points. No bobcat could take down such a large buck. It meant the mountain lion was back.

I walk past the scat on my road each day as I take my speedy, aerobic walk. I wear a red shirt and a purple hat so I don’t look like lunch to a mountain lion. Hope it continues to work.

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.

Visit my web site to learn about my gardening books.

NOTE: The comments section at the bottom of the post has disappeared. Click on the "___ Comments" button or the title under the "Blog Archives". Thanks, Robert

Deer Fencing With a View, building one.

The old way to keep deer at bay was ugly.

Deer fence barriers have usually been made with woven wire mesh up to six feet and several horizontal strands of wire above that, creating a prison-perimeter that looks like Stalag 13 and that's not acceptable for most suburban or rural yards.

It's spring and the fawns will soon be looking to stake out new territory. Testing every fence.

I learned of a special fence that had a 20-year track record of keeping deer out. Because no part of the fence is taller than four feet, the home owner's view remains mostly unobstructed; the double placement avoids the looming ugliness of the tall eight-foot agricultural version while being, in my area, just as effective. There have been at least five replications of this type of fence after I built this model. They all work.

The fence are both only four-feet high. The two four-foot high fences are built five feet apart. (See the photo in the upper right above.) Since deer can’t talk, I’m left to guess why this seemingly uncomplicated design is so effective. The most common theory is that the deer can’t see enough room between the two fences to land and then rebound over the inner fence. For whatever reason, this configuration seems to work on both flat and sloped sites. The fences must be in the open"meadow" as a neighbor built one in the forest and it didn't work. (I was the first to take the bold leap to build one on a gradual slope.)

Both four-foot fences can be made with 2"X4" inch wire-mesh fencing attached to six-foot metal stakes pounded two feet into the ground. Or, for a more aesthetic look, the most visible areas of fencing can be made of wooden boards, pickets, or grape stakes. Because it requires additional posts and hardware, the cost of the double fence will be somewhat higher than that of an eight-foot barrier, but the unencumbered view is often worth the expense And working at four feet or less is much easier for the weekend fence builder.

I staggered the top of these grape stakes by six inches and left a gap as wide as a grape stake to give the fence a lighter feel. The inner wire fence was planted with honeysuckle, that rapidly obscured the wire and continued to be effective.

With two fences, two gates must be built at each opening. One attractive solution is to incorporate two four-foot gates into a five-foot-square eight-foot-tall arbor, which can also serve as support for climbing roses planted inside the inner fence. (I learned from the client that five feet was bit to tight to easily pass through with a wheelbarrow —it worked but is a tight, knuckle-scrapping width. So, all future designs will have a six-foot wide arbor.)

I decided to have the grape stakes on the gates reflect the curve of the arbor. I used cardboard to sketch the curve, flip it, and use it as a template for the stake. (See the illustration on the lower left.) The finished arbor, as seen above is attractive. However I felt I was taking a chance as the deer might use the hole to jump through. Luckily, after over 20 years no grazing ungulates have traversed the gate.

The client planted deer-resistant English Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) grown from seed on the outside of the fence. Because the plants were grown from seed, there is a wonderful array of blossom colors—from typical lavender blue to royal blue to pastel blue and even almost pure white.

The combination of the lavender on the outside (the fourth photo) combined with the inner fence covered with honeysuckle and the fence nearly invisible. A pleasant, and fragrant, way to deter these beautiful, yet destructive-eating machines.

For the plantings outside the fence, it's important to realize that deer, their habits, and their appetites are always changing. However, in my garden, lavender has been untouched for 25 years. What deer eat and what will fence them out, varies throughout the country. Try each new strategy in moderation until you find out if it works. The answers to deer browsing will always remain as diverse as our local environments.

I built this fence nearly 20 years ago and no deer have crossed it. Once a mighty buck got trapped between the two fences. Luckily, he jumped out the way he came, away from the prized roses, strawberry plants, fruit trees and countless other delectables. If you don’t move to fast you can often slowly walk an animal back to where it breached the perimeter to see how it got in.

I rent my home and the layout of the house to the road and the garden would make it very difficult to construct a double four-foot fence. And the cost would be prohibitive. So I’ve settled upon planting deer-resistant exotics.

I wonder if this double fence will work in cold-weather areas where winters are snowy and harsh and deer become desperate. For one thing, snow drifts might make it easy for the deer to simply walk up to and over the four foot height. If you know of such a fence in your area, please let me know. For much of the west, it’s a solution worth experimenting with.

Electrical fencing, which provides a safe but deterring shock, is a common solution the snow parts of the country. A popular electric fence for parts of New England is a low-profile, five-foot-tall electric fence made of high-tensile wire.

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.


All rights reserved, Copyright 2008

Visit my web site to learn about my gardening books.

NOTE: The comments section at the bottom of the post has disappeared. Click on the "___ Comments" button or the title under the "Blog Archives". Thanks, Robert

Grazing in the Garden

I’m weeding food.

My garden is filled with Miner’s lettuce. Both the deer and I nibble the large plump outer leaves. I mostly graze while weeding. All this seed germinated on top of last years newspaper covered with mulch. It’s wall-to-wall of Miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) in vast parts of my garden. Where the seed comes from is a mystery to me.

I’ve liberated the lavenders from the web of Miner’s lettuce so they get more sunshine to begin bringing forth their smoky-green foliage. I nibble what the deer have left behind. This year, I'm trying to just weed most of the garden and save the newspaper with mulch for the wilder perimeters. I'm enjoying, for the first time in years, hand weeding.

(Miner's lettuce does have a minor amount of oxalic acid. Oxalic acid is of some concern in high amounts as it can form kidney stones. While Miner's lettuce is high in calcium, all but about 5% is tied up by the oxalic acid. Spinach has a much higher amount of oxalic acid. The rule is the Grecian guideline: "all things in moderation".)

I haven’t seen the deer on their usual morning walk from the forest through my garden. Last week a single doe went from my garden back into the deep shadows of the huckleberries and Douglas fir trees. There used to be three does that came through like clockwork every morning about eight AM. Then there were two. Now only an occasional daytime visit. But the nibbling of the Miner’s lettuce seems to indicate they’re here somewhere. When they disappear it’s usually because the mountain lion is back. But no scat on the driveway to confirm this.

I’ll just look down from the second-storey window next to my computer and see how soon they return.

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.


To see more detail of the illustration(s) put you cursor over the image and double click.
All Rights reserved. Copyright 2008

NOTE: The comments section at the bottom of the post has disappeared. Click on the "___ Comments" button or the title under the "Blog Archives". Thanks, Robert

Visit my web site to learn about my gardening books.

All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008

Deer versus Predators

When it gets down to it, deer are beautiful, graceful animals. They can leap a four-foot cattle fence with a elegant and simple leap. Before I wax eloquent, I notice the deer are now sampling even the Euphorbias in my garden. How can they stand the bad-tasting, poisonous sap? Hopefully it was just a sampling and they discovered it’s not a plant for even the most distraught of times.

Until this year, does were dropping two fawns each year. Now they are sometimes giving birth to only a single fawn. I wonder what is going on.

In years past, natural predators—bobcats and mountain lions—helped balance the deer herd, perhaps preventing excessive population explosions. With the encroachment of human habitat and agricultural endeavors on the forest and wilderness (sheep in my “backyard”), the role of predators in moderating or regulating deer populations has been greatly diminished or eliminated. Unfortunately, the predators of deer often don't mix well with suburbia or livestock. The predators of deer require large areas for their territory and are often quite shy of human activity. Furthermore, agricultural activities such as dairy and sheep herds and poultry flocks fear such predators and the farmer usually attempts to exterminate these wild cats.

I know one rural resident who was upset when a bobcat killed some of the chickens in his tiny, ram-shackle coop. But he was even more distraught when he couldn't get a clear shot at this pesty intruder. For the sake of a few eggs which were the last symbols of his back-to-the-land lifestyle—his vegetable garden had long ago been decimated by deer leaping the short, inadequate fence. This self-proclaimed environmentalist was willing to kill one of the only remaining natural predators of deer. This was the same environmentalist; who was, at the time, promoting ocean wave generation of electricity as the non-polluting answer to our coastal energy needs. He was willing to kill the first bobcat to reappear in the area in years for the sake of a little symbolic cholesterol-in-a-shell. This example clearly shows how environmental issues can so easily be segmented into seemingly unrelated fragments. A better chicken coop, a proper deer fence and a little tolerance or reverence for the sleek, marvelously-patterned bobcat could begin to strike a more normal balance with respect to deer and bobcat alike.

Ah, there is now a grape vineyard where the sheep used to graze. The vineyard manager has a “predation permit” to shoot deer that happen to get through the eight-foot fence that surrounds the 30 acres of grapes. Now the predators of deer are slowly beginning to return. I spot bobcats, or their scat, at least four times a year. I was woken up from a nap by a cacophony of many species of birds. I knew this meant they were trying to drive a bobcat away. I raised my head to see, not a bobcat, but a young mountain lion (cougar) slowly walking four feet from my house a casually through the garden. Being on the second floor, he didn’t even know I existed. The main predator of deer was back after 20 years of no sightings. I can often tell when he returns because I find the scat on the driveway and the deer don’t walk past my office every day as they used to like clockwork. I found the skeleton of a mature buck on the hillside next to the creek. Only a mountain lion is big enough to take down a mature five-point buck.

Until the return of the mountain lion, and still unto this day, the deer have had to fear another predator—the mechanical hunter called the automobile? On many a dark night, on a lonely country or suburban road, the metal meets the flesh. Sometimes the car wins and in the morning buzzards find a tasty meal. Sometimes the car looses and a radiator is pushed into the engine block and the local repair shop makes a killing—and the deer usually suffers a fatal blow. Occasionally, the car's occupants take some of the impact.

An individual deer is just small statistical blip in the population he or she belongs to. If said deer happens to be munching on your favorite rose buds, then all this highfalutin talk about the return of predators may seem like a waste of time. Your pissed at that *#^&$#@ deer, and he's got to go! Right. You can shoot what seems to be all the deer in the area, and they can recover to be a problem in a relatively short period of time. Even if you can tolerate the sight of a 150 pound mountain lion prowling around your kid's sandbox, predators most likely won't be able to keep the deer population low enough to solve many urban and suburban deer problems. One deer may not make a population in the eyes of a naturalist, but it's big enough to make a mess out of my much-beloved apple trees.

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2008


To see more detail of the illustration(s) put you cursor over the image and double click.

Visit my web site to learn about my gardening books.

NOTE: I have lost the usual way to leave a comment. Try clicking on “__ comments” below or click on the title of the blog under “Blog Archive”. I’m still trying to fix the problem. Thanks

Oh Deer!

It's early in the morning and the first of the graceful deer walks its favorite path from the woods, past the clay shards garden, and into the garden proper.

Alien plants that once were left alone by the deer now become snacks. Thirty years ago, as a new landscape gardener, I planted red-hot poker plants for their dramatic vertical stems topped by the flush of hot orange and yellow clusters of flowers, flowers that readily attract hummingbirds. I relied on these glorious plants until four years ago when the deer started to eat the flower heads. 

Now they eat the flower heads and the foliage to the ground. Similar casualties have been: the Flanders’s field poppies (They lasted four years, I was convinced the deer ate them to get high on the mind-soothing alkaloids—but alas, no morphine.), after 20 years the foliage of the glorious ‘Sunset’ rockrose with it’s hot-pink crape-paper flowers are reduce to stubble, a curious top-set “walking” onion lasted until just two years ago and is now eaten to the ground each summer as the local forage dries up, Euryops shrubs aren’t eaten, just the hot-yellow flowers negating the reason for planting them, the native sea pinks lasted only three years before the deer found them near my house, the native ginger was eaten back every fall only to be a lush thicket in the winter-the list goes on. I planted two types of ceanothus shrubs (the native “Summer Lilac” or tick brush—Ceanothus ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Julia Phelps’). The deer don’t eat the foliage. They just use the shrub to rub the velvet from their antler and destroy entire limbs. After four or five years they need to be replaced—because I love the rich violet color of the flowers. (Eating is not the only hazard. Once a deer simply laid down for a rest on top of a plant it doesn’t eat, gray santolina, thus breaking the shrub to death.

In the forest, the deer graze some on: the tender new growth of the huckleberry shrubs and new shoots of the western ferns; the lower limbs of the thimbleberry and new shoots of the native honeysuckle. They even browse the new growth of poison oak—which suits me fine.

It hurts my intellect, rattles my heart to forgive the deer as they graze upon native plants and evolve to consume well-established alien foliage and flowers. It’s also difficult to appreciate the grace and beauty of the does and their precious fawns when they give birth to two fawns a year compared to the more common birth of just one fawn many years ago, knowing the population is doubling every year due to the lack of enough predators or rampant disease. 

Luckily the deer have yet found the lavenders I grow tasty (nor the gophers). But an ominous hint of the future might be playing out as I’ve seen the naked stem of French lavenders’ blossoms. Having written a the book on lavender, if I loose these plants to the deer I might just throw in the towel (or shrub).

It’s a very difficult horticultural dance to waltz with the changing habits of the deer and strike a balance between alien and native shrubbery. There’s nothing very spiritual about wanting to strangle to death a svelte deer as it grazes on a beloved plant or favored fruit tree. The fawns are a precious addition to each spring, but a danger as they graze in my garden each summer. Deer are one of the best ways to try and deal with attachment. I often loose the battle.

Eight-foot deer fences start popping up when city folk move to the country to protect prized roses and a myriad of other plants that are just entrées for foraging deer. This leads to a concentration-camp look with the strand of barb wire at the eight foot level. It need not be that way. 

I learned of a special fence that had a 20-year track record of keeping deer out. It was only 4 feet high. But there were two 4-foot high fences 5 feet apart. Since deer can’t talk, I’m left to guess why this seemingly uncomplicated design is so effective. The most common theory is that the deer can’t see enough room between the two fences to land and then rebound over the inner fence. For whatever reason, this configuration seems to work on both flat and sloped sites. (This double fence may not work in cold-weather areas where winters are snowy and harsh and deer become desperate. For one thing, snow drifts might make it easy for the deer to simply walk up to and over the four foot height. For much of the west, it’s a solution worth experimenting with.) 

I built such a fence 18 years ago for a friend and no deer have crossed it. Once a mighty buck got trapped between the two fences. Luckily, he jumped out the way he came, away from the prized roses, strawberry plants, fruit trees and countless other delectables. If you don’t move to fast you can slowly walk an animal back to where it breached the perimeter to see how it got in.

I rent my home and the layout of the house to the road and the garden would make it very difficult to construct. So I’ve settled upon planting exotics.

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.

All rights reserved, Copyright 2008

Visit Robert Kourik's web site to learn about his great gardening books.

How I Got Started.

Both my grandmothers gardened in their own way.

One had a wild-and-woolly garden where annuals sprung up every season among large patches of perennials. As a youth I learned very few of the names, but loved to hide beneath the enormous sweeping arms of an unpruned forsythia shrub, right next to the self-perpetuating Black-Eyed-Susan patch. Her garden was for hiding, crawling, exploring, and climbing the sour cherry tree each summer.

The other garden was manicured, unspoiled by "weeds", tended daily, and was the epitome of the Midwestern combination of groomed lawn with annual and perennial flowers, shrubs, and vines. I worked in this garden with grandma Kourik to gather the dew-laden flowers to be prepared for drying. With a gentle breath we scattered the dew. Some flowers were carefully covered in sand and slowly dried in the oven. Others were layered with borax and left on a ledge near a sunny window. After carefully shaking the sand or borax off each perfect blossom, they were arranged like a flower bouquet and placed beneath a convex case of glass surrounded by an ornamental brass rim. Flowers under glass for prosperity These we sold like a little cottage "industry" for spending money. But I kept many.

Now, some 50 years later; those kept out of direct sunlight still shine with their true colors. Each pansy still revealing their mixture purple petals above and yellow petals streaked with tan below. The others have shifted to a gradient of tans and browns with hints of blue, amber, and yellow. I wrote a book (The Lavender Garden) in 1998. A few years later I was riffling through my collection of dried-floral bouquets and found one with five sprigs of lavender gracefully arching toward the rim of the glass. The scent of lavender that lingered deep within my brain began to flourish in the 1970s when I started planting them in drought-stricken gardens I maintained - and where there were interloping deer. As in Jitterbug Perfume, (by Tom Robbins) my olfactory memories gradually awakened as I began my love affair with lavender in my 20s. The roots of my gardening linger in the distant past. (Well, not that distant, only 50 years.)

All rights reserved, Copyright 2008