Disappointment

Last night, I went out to the garden and came face to face with the first deer of the season. I'd seen her damage that morning. A host of the old yellow daylilies on the path rising out of the wild meadow had been deflowered .

Her head poked out of the rich vegetation and the two of us just stared at each other. And then I began banging my fists on the rail of the deck in impotent rage. "Get out of here!" I screamed. "You don't belong here." She stood blinking doe-like at me as if she lacked any trace of comprehension, or fear, for that matter. She was just a large, pre-programmed eating machine. Her destiny was to snag any botanical hors d'ouerve that fate sets before her without caution or prejudice. And indeed, as I stood there screaming at the unwelcome intruder, my periphery vision was registering her destruction. All my budding daylilies were gone.

Only earlier that day, I had taken one of my good friends into the garden for a tour. And poking out from the black-stemmed hydrangeas were the gorgeous first flowerings of the daylily cotton candy. Tamara, my friend, who has as much interest in gardening as a hermit does in entertaining, commented appreciatively. I was a proud gardener. It is too early in the garden season for this deer to come. A gardener must learn to share her garden with all comers, even the pests. Slugs munch the lettuce. Caterpillars defoliate the bushes. Something else causes the peaches to rot. It's all part of a master plan that not even a master gardener controls. But last year, the destroyer waited almost a full month longer until July 18 before intruding in my paradise .  So I'm selfishly sad this morning. I even shed a tear or two. Okay, I admit, it was an all-out snotty blubber. I hate you deer! The Putterer

A Sunday Putter

Yesterday, Sunday, I went out to garden. The vegetable box was completely overgrown. I pulled out the kale (we ate it for dinner), the old lettuce, the cilantro and all the nasturtium. Then I replanted lettuce seed for the coming weeks. The tomatoes are clinging sturdily to the vine, but haven't ripened. I have one eggplant that I'll need to pick shortly. I clipped back all the daylilies; pulled out their dried stems to make everything look neater. Then I climbed around behind the crab apple tree and entered into the fearful zone of overgrown vines, tilting apple tree, listing Joe Pye Weed and intrusive poke weed. I whacked it all back, using my weed whacker, I gave the whole hillside a clean shave. I pulled the apple tree up and tied it tall, anchoring it to the crab apple tree. Poor old Joe Pye (my cousin) had been completely overtaken by this nasty vine. I don't know what it's called, but it grows like a blanket over things and it has these seed pods. It's bad, bad, bad, my neighbor A, told me last year. Meanwhile, next door, my neighbor C, has a forest of pokeweed about to go to seed. The birds will come and distribute the seeds everywhere, bringing on disaster for anyone not wanting the stuff to grow. Nothing can be done about it, though.

The sweat poured off of me as I worked. I kept a towel near by and wiped frequently. It felt so good. T stopped by and said, "There really is a garden back here." That was surprising. She hates gardening. Meanwhile, out front, the gold finch feeder is attracting a huge clientele.

I have to get up now and go get ready for my day job. The Putterer

Oh Deer Me

On Thursday morning, a deer trespassed in my garden. He munched his way from the daylily cotton candy, to mini pearl, to Lady Jane Staunton. He sawed off the purple blooms of two hostas and nibbled away at the sedum autumn joy. I found his footprint pressed into the soil next to my eggplant. A friend intervened and chased him away, but the damage was done. Still the next morning, a few lilies opened in defiance and enough color remains. It was disappointing, but not devastating.

I had a deer several seasons ago, who after tearing through my garden like it was a salad before dinner, dropped scat to further the insult. Since then, I have been carefully selecting plants from the catalogs marked "deer resistant." But the daylilies are my passion, I plant them fully acknowledging the risk that a deer might come and take them out in just moments. He must have come from Cherie's backyard and indeed, he likely stepped over and around the lobelia and monarda and cones that are not to his liking. A success, I suppose.

The garden attracts. It calls out not only to my spirit, but the birds come--there's an abundance of guana now splashed on my chairs from a nest somewhere high above. The bees and wasps and yellow jackets are attracted. The mosquitos. It is a haven for wild things. And so too, a deer. The Putterer

Postscript: Life's synchronicities are intriguing. Shortly after posting, I drove past a dead deer at the side of the road. Heartbreaking, to see it.

A Day in the Life of a Daylily

The daylilies are on parade. It wouldn't be a Fourth of July celebration without their fabulous skirts flashing their sexy stamens at the sun-soaked sky. I have now more than a dozen varieties. This is Strutters Ball and she grows in two places in my garden, one near the footpath and another by the Harry Lauder Walking Stick. They break open in the morning, flash with a furious flourish all day long and collapse in exhaustion as soon as the sun sets. One day, 24 hours, for every lily. If I had just one day to live, I'd do it just like Lady daylily. I'd put on my best dress, fix my hair up right (yes, that's some Bruce, "Out on the Streets") and bring the world to my knees. The Putterer

My Favorite Chair

In my garden, I have a chair. It's rugged, worn and really old. Next to it sits a bright yellow new one, but I prefer the sagging, worm-ridden one. My brother bought it for a buck at a flea market. Sitting in it, I feel its ancient strength at my back, and a kind of sun-warmed wisdom and solace.

My garden became a metaphor the moment it was created. It began in the waning days of my mother's life. She had long found joy in growing things. And as her body succumbed to illness, her garden flourished as if she'd transferred her own life force to it. Many of the plants in my garden were transplanted from hers and every season they come back and pay homage to her. The day she died, my brother and I went shopping for plants. We didn't know what else to do.

From my chair, I look at a flowerbed that I created on my birthday, shortly after our home was renovated about eight years ago. There, I planted a black-stemmed hydrangea, lovely old ferns that I transplanted from my grandmother's home, and a bush called a Sixteen Candles (appropriate, as I was wrestling with raising teenagers). The witch hazel I planted next to the stairs was but a twig back then.

Now, its branches grow up, and out, and wide, in a crazy every which-a-way fashion that just confounds my attempts to prune it. But this season from my perch in my chair, I noticed high over my head, the tip of the witch hazel’s furthest branch is just touching the tip of the branch of the old dogwood growing from behind my chair. In the dappled sunlit ceiling, their fingertip branches recall the iconic Hand of God in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.

One season, I went crazy for daylilies. Those beguiling ladies dot the landscape and throughout June and July while their blooms play out in my garden, their names read like a poetry slam at the local library: Strawberry Candy, Elegant Candy and Buttered Popcorn; Lady Rebecca Staunton and Mini Pearl dance around Moonlight Masquerade, and don't forget the glorious Strutter’s Ball, Sue Raurbach and Spanish Glo.

Over many seasons, I’ve become obsessed with composting. I grind up my leaves in the fall, collect my grass clippings all summer, and horde the detritus from my kitchen waste. My brother and I even went rogue in our composting efforts. Cruising the neighborhood riding low in his truck, we’d sneak up and make off with bags of other people's yard waste. The rich scent of “black gold” filled with fat, wriggling earth worms still turns me on.

A few seasons back, I lusted for a raised bed to grow tomatoes, herbs and early spring greens. I could have bought a ready-made cedar box from a garden supply store, but instead I built one myself. I bought untreated pine boards and stained them with a recipe I found in a farmer's catalog, dated 1865: "Take boiled linseed oil and stir in its pulverized charcoal to the consistency of paint. Put a coat of this over the timber, and there is not a man that will live to see it rotten." (It hasn’t yet rotted.)

The year that I built my garden box, I was spending all my spare time in my garden. Throughout the cold months of December and January, I plotted and planned new beds, which I dug myself whenever the winter days were warm enough. I brought in huge stepping stones and with the help of my friends' teenage sons, I laid in garden paths. Everything was going as planned, when in February, a strange dimple in my left breast turned out to be cancer. And as if that wasn't enough, the right breast had it too, just a different kind.

I knew that summer, my gardening days would be numbered and as the date of my surgery loomed, I frantically planted, weeded and prepared the garden to a perfection. I remember the evening before my surgery in May. In a most inconvenient downpour, I finished potting my geraniums with rainwater cascading down my neck and arms and back. My friend, Deb, forced me to come in out of the rain. She ordered me to the shower and fixed me a cup of tea. That night, just as I had perused garden catalogs and built my garden, Deb and I poured over porn magazines. We were searching for a perfect set of breasts to show the plastic surgeon, who would rebuild my body.

After the surgery, I sat in my chair, I could do little else. And I despaired over not being able to care for my family and my garden. It was all for not. The garden flourished without me. I don’t recall a single weed that year. So did my children. They became young, caring little women that summer. It was as if I'd paid forward during all those years of nurturing.

Today, my garden is growing old with me. Seedlings are maturing into hardy plants. Saplings are becoming trees. The burgeoning irises and lilies and hostas will again need to be divided and dispersed among my friends. My mother's plants, too, will continue to bloom long past the day she planted them. Together this garden and I are gaining wisdom. To everything there is a season. The Putterer

Spirits in the Night

Crazy Daisy and her mission man were back in the alley tradin' hands
'long came Wild Billy with his friend G-man all duded up for Saturday night. (This is the Putterer's favorite Bruce song.)

I bought Crazy Daisy from Bluestone Perennials early this spring. She's planted in three places around the front yard. Two in front of the fence and one behind (near the gazing ball). And her mission man is a beautiful Japanese Iris that I bought the first season of my garden.

The summer surge is about to begin. The hydrangeas are all at the ready. The oak-leaf is looking majestic. I trimmed back the other bushes to give it some space. The progensis was overgrown and looking more like a Dr. Seuss character than an elegant bush, so I topped it off. I'm not the most gentle of horticulturalists. It's looking a little mauled at the moment.

The cone flowers have hints of pink in their buds. The old fashioned daylilies (Kwanzo) are in glorious orange. They all lean in the same direction, following the sun's rays through the day. The back bank is crushed by their numbers. One day, I should probably thin them out and spread them all around the neighborhood. The elite daylilies are blooming or just about to. The purple-throated Moonlight Masquerade was the first to appear this past Saturday. I have eleven now and their names are worthy of a poem: Strawberry Candy (by the old birdfeeder in the front yard); buttered popcorn (next to the St. John's Wort in the back); Elegant Candy (grows under 16 Candles in the back); Moonlight Masquerade (by the black-stem hydrangea); Mini Pearl (by the back steps); Lady Rebecca Staunton (near the tomatoes); Stella D'Oro (front fence and in the back); an unknown yellow (transferred from Kate's yard and in the front); two Strutter's Balls (in the back); Spanish Glow (by the front fence) and Sue Raurbach (in the thyme out back).

Enough garden reverie. It's off to my day job. The Putterer