I am writing this in the middle of my third separate treatment for Lyme disease. I have two friends also under treatment (but not from ticks from my garden!) Personally, I have despaired of seeing any community action in the village of Manlius to address this health and safety issue. The eastern part of the village has been decimated by deer browsing in the past six weeks, but our elected officials don’t seem to care.
I am therefore abandoning any efforts to encourage action in this column. I have abolished the Deer Control Clock. If readers want action on this issue, write the mayor and board members and make your wishes known.
Since it’s my garden, I’ve decided just to look out for myself. Like “Star Wars” this is “A New Beginning.” The first phase is now complete. I have successfully excluded deer from the main part of my garden. My defenses make me feel like an oasis in the desert. First, I’ll stop the damage to the plants, but eventually, the population of infected deer ticks may fall enough that I stop having to be treated for new infected deer ticks as quite as often.
The next phase, begun just this month, involves moving all the deer candy in beds along the front of my property, which are outside the fence, and replacing them with pre-existing deer yuk from inside the fence. Deer-yuk plants are those that have never been browsed by deer, even when there have been mobs of voracious deer in the garden in years past. Because my garden is mature, I have lots of big specimens of deer-yuk plants, so my only expense is the actual work of moving them.
The first small bed I renovated sits between the sidewalk and the street. It originally contained two serviceberries underplanted with large and medium hostas. The hostas looked like celery (no leaves left) when they were transplanted, but they will be fine next spring. In their place, I put two hellebores, two clumps of epimedium, and four Christmas ferns. I have extolled the virtues of hellebores before. Epimedium is a classy, understated groundcover.
The many species are native to China, with scattered populations in other parts of Asia and Europe. A number of very nice garden cultivars are available, mostly distinguished by the color of their delicate spring flowers and whether their green leaves are tinged with maroon. In China, wild populations are being decimated because active ingredients in the plant are used in Chinese medicine to treat osteoporosis and erectile dysfunction. One of their benefits in garden use is that they will tolerate dry shade. They spread slowly by underground rhizomes and are often partially evergreen.
Of all the native ferns in my garden, Christmas ferns (Polystichum acrostichoides) are really special. Their dark green shiny fronds grow vertically from the center of the clump and eventually get pushed to the periphery, where ultimately they turn brown and fall over. I usually just clip them off during spring clean-up. In my garden, they are evergreen and tolerant of moist to dry conditions and full sun, light shade, and heavy shade. By comparison, most of our native ferns either look blousy or are really large. I may plant a few allium or daffodil bulbs to lend a bit of spring color, but the new version of this bed looks really nice.
The next bed is larger and I have just begun its renovation. I started by moving the hostas out of one corner in front of a large evergreen, and replacing them with Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia). This is an oft-grown subshrub that emerges relatively late in the spring and blooms from August into the fall. The profuse lavender flowers and subtle fragrance is very pleasing, but the plants always seem to get too big.
The plants I moved are supposed to be dwarf, but they are enormous. Standard Russian sage varieties get even larger if they are happy. I usually clip them off about six inches off the ground after frost has driven them into dormancy. The next spring, I tend to worry whether they have died as everything else emerges and takes off and the woody stalks just sit there. Never fear, they are always “delayed in transit.”
As this process of replacing deer candy with deer yuk continues, I’ll update readers about what other plants have been put in the earth on the front lines of deer control.
