My wife is the gardener in our household. She loves being out in the garden. She loves to see plants and flowers growing as the result of her efforts. She works hard and I am lazy. I am her labourer when she can't manage the heavier digging required to move things around as they outgrow the particular spot she first planted them. To me, the garden is a pleasant place to sit and relax, when you aren't barbecuing!
But I can see the attraction in helping make things grow and blossom and flower. I do appreciate the beauty of the natural surroundings in which we are fortunate enough to live and I do quite like taking the occasional cutting, sticking it in a bit of rooting compound and seeing if I can get it to grow - absolutely free! (The free part I love!) Our garden backs on to a local school, close to heath and woodland and beyond the very back of our garden is a protected area (some 11 acres) of woodland, which is home to many badgers. They occasionally visit the garden, but we haven't taken to feeding them yet, as we are told they tend to root out bulbs and we've seen the evidence of their hunting for worms in the dug up patches of my (only seeded last year) lawn. The woodland is also home to deer. I don't know what varieties, but some are I guess small pony size and others are not much bigger than a family cat. We'd seen them a few times in neighbours' gardens and on the drive, usually scattering quite quickly when we drove up. They are such beautifully graceful creatures. They seem to glide rather than walk and can be stood almost invisible just yards away.
We moved into the house six years ago now, and it took us about two years to begin making inroads into the thick and very high laurels bordering the garden on the school side. For those of you that don't know, laurels (so I am told) tend to grow in kind of loops, where they grow up and then at a certain age the lower spreading branches seem to dive into the ground and almost form a fresh plant - still attached to the original. The process (again so I am told) takes about ten years per loop. We had three loops between us and the school and at their highest, I would guess they were maybe 25 to 30 feet high. I cut back between one and two loops to enlarge the flowerbed and give the whole garden substantially more light. Some levelling work was needed and then my wife got on with planting out lots of pots on the enlarged patio, as well as planting in some roses and lilies in the flower beds.
That summer (2005 I think it was) late June early July, possibly a little later, my wife had the garden a mass of colour. We had lilies (bright yellow and orange) a mass of roses both in the pots and in the flower beds, as well as some hibiscus shrubs which were nicely budding. We sat out on the patio one evening and looked around us and I suppose we felt we had arrived. The garden was "tamed" and all we could see around us was bright beautiful colours. I think my mother in law had even contributed a couple of sturdy rose bushes which were also already in flower. Bright yellow and perfectly formed flowers - although not much scent. It seems that's the price you pay for a pretty shape - they don't smell much. The rough looking ones with odd shaped heads and masses of disorganised petals - now they smell!
So the next morning we stroll out onto the patio and notice something is missing. At first we can't quite put our finger on it, but then as I see my wife's face begin to crumple into tears I begin to get the picture. Not a single flower or bud in sight. No, I'm not exaggerating. Every single rose - and there were hundreds of flowers -every lily, just every bud, all snipped off about a half inch below where the head was.
My wife was distraught. What could have happened - and in just one night? The answer I am sorry to say was deer. We don't know how many but they must have had a feast. We discovered on asking around that we had inadvertently laid on a banquet of the deer's most beloved foods when we began planting out our roses. It seems they are quite partial to lilies too and - well - just about any fresh flowering shoots and buds. We asked experts and the response from all of them was the same - you need a high fence and a cattle grid on the drive. We don't have the money for either and so we kept on asking around until we got some cheaper suggestions. We had some weird and wonderful suggestions as to how to keep deer from eating our flowers.
Perhaps the strangest, but also the most believable was to spread lion droppings around the borders of the garden. I say believable because you can easily imagine that antelope of any kind would be keen to avoid lions! But we live in Surrey, England and there just aren't that many lions in the area willing to contribute! Male urine was also suggested and since it's free we tried that for a while. No good, any time it rained in the night the deer were back and our blooms were gone. Besides, I was more than a little worried that the neighbours might think me more than a little strange if they'd witnessed my evening ritual. Come to think of it they don't visit as much as they used to..... I even set up security lights on very short cycles of on to off, having read somewhere that the deer don't like to be startled. Oh no? I watched a full grown male stag meander across the lawn, tripping each of the three lights in turn without turning a hair and still moving in for a munch on the lilies. Enraged, I did rush out into the garden shouting at him. He did at least have the good grace to run, but only into the shrubs from where he turned to see if I'd followed. I had and he gave up and turned tail, leaving me victorious for that night!
Somewhere along the way a hairdresser friend had suggested sprinkling human hair among the pots and flowers in the garden that we particularly wanted to protect. Apparently she had heard that the deer kind of snuffle around the base of the plants and the hair gets up their noses and they don't like it and move off. We didn't get round to trying that as neither my wife or I liked the idea of all those hair clippings littering our pots and patio. I dare say if we hadn't found something that worked, we would have gotten around to trying that too.
We'd also been told that deer in the garden don't particularly like strong smelling herbs and since we'd always wanted a few home grown herbs admittedly in a herb garden, as opposed to littering the flower beds) we decided to have a go at the rather more long term solution of planting herbs alongside and around the prized roses and lilies. To be honest, the deer still seemed to come and feed on the flowers and fresh shoots regardless, but I think we were letting negativity take over a little and don't think we really gave the herbs a fair trial. They are still in the garden now and may well have contributed to our eventual (hopefully not temporary) solution. I have to say though, by now we were really getting to the end of our tether.
How were we going to stop the deer eating our plants? So - at the end of our tether and still no further forward with keeping the deer from the garden what were we going to do. The prospect of the 6 foot high fence, gates and a cattle grid were beginning to loom very large. But that would cost thousands, possibly more than ten thousand pounds that we don't have, just to keep a few deer out of the garden.
Madness.
I was told that I am not allowed to shoot deer as they are protected. I'm not sure about that as I know Americans go out shooting deer and just about everything else every Sunday, even in New York, but I have a sneaking suspicion that deer are protected here in the UK. Please someone tell me if that is right. I wouldn't have wanted to kill them, but stinging them a bit with an air rifle, now that seemed a much cheaper option than the gates and all the rest of the fencing and might just have made them think twice before coming back to eat our roses. Finally someone came up with a suggestion that I thought was worth a try and sounded plausible, humane, (I wasn't really going to shoot the little beggars) not too expensive, involved a little d i y (do it yourself) and above all was not going to cost the earth. It was also something that I had read somewhere in one of the many self help articles on the subject and involved using a material of which I am a big fan. So what was this marvellous solution to the problem of deer eating our flowers.
What was the answer to our problem that all the other so called solutions had failed to solve. Well it involved something that I like and something my wife hates. And, since she is also very dear (forgive me couldn't resist it) it seemed to me that the deer may well also not like this common household item so detested by my wife. The solution - at least so far - and bearing in mind we do have herbs planted throughout the garden also, but the latest change I've made that has given us almost a complete summer with flowers is that I have placed pieces of soap around the garden. Now it's not just any old soap. It's magic soap and we're selling it for 25 per bar........ no just kidding, it's common or garden coal tar soap. I think it costs about 60 pence for a couple of bars (to be honest if I'd known it would work I'd have paid 10) and so far it's done the trick. I chop each bar into about 6 pieces (economy again!) and at first I tied each piece with string close to the plants I wanted to protect.
For a few days we had no unwanted visitors that I was aware of. But after about a week or so I noticed some of the soap had disappeared. Puzzled I investigated more closely and it looked as though the string had been cut and the soap was nowhere to be seen. Now I'm assuming that the foxes that raid our bins most nights are to blame and I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that they love the smell of coal tar and adore the vegetable fat that the soap is mostly made up of. Anyway, I couldn't have the foxes running off with all my carefully prepared soap, so, instead of string, I used plastic cable ties to firmly attach the soap.
FANTASTIC. The soap stays on the bamboo stakes and as I said SO FAR we have all our shoots and flowers. I did notice the other evening though that we have a badger rooting around the garden and it did occur to me that they may be partial to a little coal tar soap. Either way, so long as they leave the flowers alone they can gave the occasional piece of soap.
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