By Brian Lee
I swore I’d never become like them. I witnessed my parents’ futile battle with deer my whole life and thought it absurd.
"Why?" I’d ask, pointing out the irony in their planting pretty things only to disfigure the effect with chicken wire and rebar fencing. Added to the eyesore were rags soaked in wolf pee hanging from shrubbery like the strange fruit in a Billie Holiday song.
So when I bought my place and it came with a "natural garden" that had survived decades of Darwinian selection at the mouths of Francis Peninsula deer, I went with it.
I’m not a huge fan of fancy flower gardens anyway and shun the idea of trying to recreate a Guatemalan jungle in a BC backyard. I appreciate the look and practical benefits of native plants and if anyone questions it, I just call it xeriscaping.
I pruned the salal to fit the contours of the rockeries and trimmed the ferns every spring to allow the new growth full advantage. Basically, it was a low-effort experiment in allowing nature to take a somewhat guided course but it also cultivated a smashing relationship between me and the deer.
I usually made efforts not to startle them as I went about my business.
"Help yourself, deer. Mi garden es su garden — keep it trimmed."
I looked upon it as a symbiotic model for humanity — if only the rest of the world could learn to live in such peace.
But then someone close to me took it upon herself to uncover some ancient terraced gardens, long overgrown with salal and St. John’s Wort.
Despite arguments about her insistence that if it wasn’t purchased in a four-inch pot it was a "weed," she pressed on until, finally, I had to admit it looked much better.
Pretty soon I got involved and as we hacked and dug away the undesirables, added soil and revealed rock work hidden beneath thick mats of moss, my gardening vision had undergone a profound change.
After some hasty research into "deer-proof" plants, we invested a small fortune at a nursery. The gratification of seeing the completed project, with all its potential for future growth and esthetic reward was worth it.
But it wasn’t to last. I first became aware the deer proof garden wasn’t so while working at my desk. I happened to look up to see a healthy buck with velvet horns plucking out one of the plants whose name I can’t remember.
Our truce now shattered, I chased it off with a crazed yelp followed by a pang of regret over how everything had changed.
But there was no going back and I thought conditioning the bugger with a pellet in the ass now and then might work. That just made him warier and he seemed to understand that when the black truck was gone, the salad bar was open. Not long after, we returned home from a day at the lake to find the garden demolished.
Now I’ve sprayed the plants with an internet concoction and if that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to buy one of those expensive electronic frequency repellers.
I figure that’s still cheaper than the next step — buying a cougar.
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