Visitors in the Mist

Sometimes, God gives us little miraculous gifts to lighten our load for the day.

That is the only way I can explain it.  I was walking the treadmill yesterday morning at 6:30 a.m.  It was a misty, cold morning, in the Flint Hills, about three days after the last snowfall.  Another sad day towards Spring without being able to work in the garden.  I glanced up at the window to see movement in the garden.

When what to my wondering eyes should appear but four hungry deer feeding in my back garden?  I rushed upstairs in an instant and grabbed my camera to capture the moment.  I'm sorry for the quality of the pictures, but what can I say?  It was still dark, I was using a zoom lens and handholding the camera, and I woke up fifteen minutes before my fine motor skills were tested.  Not to mention that I had been exercising seconds before. 

Now, some gardeners would be outraged or dismayed at seeing four deer carefully selecting their morning menu from the gardener's larder, but sometimes, as a Darwinian gardener, I'm willing to allow my soft-eyed neighbors a little charity.  That is especially true when I know that the weather has been nasty and the pickings are probably getting a little thin on the prairie right now.  And when I know that the howling of the coyotes last evening was likely unnerving to these guys and may have driven them out of the bottoms.  Besides, most of the stuff I really care about is either surrounded by woven wire or buried deep beneath the snow.

Anyway, this little guy seemed to think that my Clematis paniculata was particularly scrumptious.  It is brown and likely will die back a little with the cold winter anyway, so what do I care?

I drew the line at this one, however, when it nibbled at my sole witch hazel, which is just beginning to bloom.  I suspect that the scent of the witch hazel may really have been what enticed them up to my garden.  Shortly after this, I thought I probably had enough pictures and chased them off, using the camera flash as a substitute for a muzzle blast.

My anti-deer defences are at minimum effectiveness this time of year.  I normally have little problem with deer in the area.  Well, at least after one group "trimmed" my new apple trees down to bare stems years ago and I learned to keep fencing around all new trees for several years until some stature is obtained.  Thankfully, the deer mostly leave my treasured roses alone due to my second defensive tactic.  Along with the fencing cylinders around trees, the defensive measure I use successfully in the rest of my garden is a proprietary secret brew that I use to "mark" my territory boundaries frequently during the spring and summer.  Forget whatever you have read or heard about hanging soap or human hair in the trees or purchasing lion or wolf urine at $50/ounce to repel deer.  I utilize a natural substitute that's readily available nearly every morning, biodegradable, very inexpensive, and almost 100% effective.  It even has value as a source of nitrogenous fertilizer if it is not applied too heavily.  Production of the substance is by the most natural and organic means and I am able to brew a new batch nearly every morning.  I believe it is more potent if the anti-deer application takes place while one is picturing a good venison steak or perhaps a deer head mounted over the fireplace.  Unfortunately, my secret ingredient is difficult to apply in winter and the little guy at the left is telling me what he thinks of my efforts to repel him in this coldest of winters.

Only one other person knows about my secret deer-repelling elixir, that is unless the neighbors have been rising early recently. That person happens to be my spouse, who once again proved her tolerance of a slightly-eccentric husband by responding to the news that there were deer in the garden with the command "You need to start peeing in the garden again."

And I shall, just as soon as it warms up a little bit out there.

First Dates

Although I'm a gardener who likes to write, up until I began blogging I was terrible at keeping a gardening journal.  That statement probably raises in your mind the question of whether or not a blog qualifies as a journal, but for the sake of argument, and to ease my conscience, we're going to pretend that it does.  And for clarity, I intend "terrible at keeping a journal" to mean that I was inconsistent at it; I refuse to comment about it or worry about whether an English language fanatic is reading my writing, lest it stifle my output.  Sometimes fools trudge along where wise men fear to tread.

I previously started out each year with good intentions, fast out of the gate, but I normally faded at the first turn.  Each year for at least a decade and a half, I have written down the dates that those first few garden species come into bloom and then peak at the bottom of my computerized plant inventory.  There will usually be a few other random loose notes about something here or there, but after a few weeks my notes trickle off and disappear.  Thus, while I have an excellent idea of when the 'New Hampshire Gold' forsythia first bloomed each year, and when the Rugosa rose 'Marie Bugnet' first bloomed, I have no idea when the Hydrangea paniculata bloomed, or the crape myrtle or the Rudbeckia hirta.  From these notes, I can tell you that my snow crocus, recently blogged on, is right on time, with the earliest I've ever seen it bloom on February 22nd, and the latest March 9th.  Forsythia usually peaks around the 20th of March, but I've sighted the first buds as early as March 6th and as late as March 29th.  Twice, the bright red 'Great Scarlet Poppy', or 'Iranian Poppy' (Papaver bracteatum) has first bloomed exactly on my May birthday.  

Even when I've made an effort, there are long periods when I cease to enter anything, usually due to depression about the garden's progress.  In 2004, I entered nothing between April 27th and June 1st except to note on 6/1/04 that it was official that May ws the windiest May on record in this area of Kansas, averaging over 10 MPH continual wind.  And in 2007, my entries simply ceased at the very hard and very late freeze around April 19th which put an end to the spring flowers that year and threatened all the young plants of my garden.

I have also defaced my Tallgrass Prairie Wildflowers guide (authored by Doug Ladd and Frank Oberle) with the dates when I observed the first blooms from a number of native forbs on the tract of land we own (see the sample page pictured above).  In fact, it may reveal a small megalomaniac streak buried deep within my psyche, but I always secretly hope some of those records survive to be used by a future naturalist to document climate changes, just as Thomas Jefferson's garden notes have been used by biologists of the 20th Century.  Mr. Jefferson and I have little else in common, but at least I take some comfort in the fact that his garden notes were also sporadic.  For now, during the 15 or so years that I've been keeping records, I can tell you that I'm unable to conclude anything about global warming or cooling in the Flint Hills, except to say that the native plants follow the general average temperatures of the year pretty well.  The earliest noted bloom of Blue Wild Indigo (Babtisia australis) in this area was on 4/26/04, one of the hottest years on record in Kansas, while in the more recent and cooler years I've found them around May 10th.  In fact, the date I noted for the first bloom of this plant in 1996 (the first year I recorded it) was May 10th, exactly the same as it was last year in 2010.  Maybe if I can keep this up for a hundred years, we'll at least know if Global Warming has affected Kansas. 

Stylish Blogger Award

Sherry, of her blog If Only Sweat Were Irrigation, was kind enough recently to bestow on me the Stylish Blogger Award.  As a garden blogger, I'm thankful that at least a few others are reading and enjoying the blog and I hope I can live up to those expectations.

According to the guidelines given for the SBA, I must a) link back to Sherry's blog (see above), b) give seven facts about myself and c) pass the award on to other bloggers that I consider deserving.  So, in that spirit, my seven disclosures are:

1. I hate Spirea in all forms and colors.
2. My writing interest goes way back, encouraged by a 4th grade teacher who gave us brownie points for writing poems and then by a pair of very dedicated high school English teachers who essentially created an advanced English curriculum specifically for me, long before "Advanced Placement" classes became common.
3. I got hooked on Old Garden Roses because of a book by Thomas Christopher, In Search of Old Roses.  It's an addiction I'm unable to break.
4. I'm a Taurus, earthy and stubborn.  Anyone surprised?  What's your sign Baby?
5. As a young boy, aged 6 or 7, I would paint the wooden fence posts around the farm all afternoon for a 60 cent book.  My mother should have been jailed for violation of child labor laws.
6. As a teenager, I used to chuckle at my father planting flowers around the house.  It seems that he got the last laugh.
7. If you'd have asked me when I was 17, Kansas is the last place in the USA I would have told you that I was likely to move to.

And I would like to nominate two bloggers that I follow every day for the Stylish Blogger Award.  I found both of them through the gardenweb.com rose forums and they've become friends I've never met.   The first is Connie @ Hartwood Roses who writes a really nice, varied blog about her greyhounds and her home and her roses.  Oh yeah, and she runs a mail-order rose plant business.  The second is Paul Barden @ Paul Barden's Roses.  Paul is a rose hybridizer extraordinaire whose knowledge of rose breeding is far beyond anything I've ever heard of or encountered, and I suspect I've only seen the surface so far.  I expect Paul to someday end up being spoken of in the same breath with Austin, Moore, Buck, McGredy, Kordes, and other legends.