Oh dear, deer

We had the usual deer damage in the cold months this winter--so common a problem here that I haven't even written about it before. In fact, the tulips in the front garden were hit pretty hard although, oddly enough, the deer seemed to like the red ones and not the yellows. In general I can tolerate deer--they do need to eat--but now they have taken to nibbling my oldest (3 year) rosebush which is promising to have its first good summer and I am very cross indeed.

The rose in question is named Awakening; it's a sport of New Dawn which is a vigorous and reliable plant that I had trouble keeping pruned properly at my old house. Awakening has flowers that look like old roses--New Dawn's are more modern. The plan was to have it climb all over the split rail fence in front of the house with a few purple clematises twined into its branches for good measure. I bought Awakening from a Canadian company that should stay nameless--it arrived quite puny looking. It had to be "sweated" with a paper bag to get it to sprout at all the first year. It has survived; last year it had a couple of canes and a smattering of flowers but I was sufficiently discouraged that I bought New Dawn itself last fall to share the fence. This spring Awakening looks very vigorous and the long cane along the fence was covered with the start of smaller canes all with lovely shiny foliage that's a pleasure in itself. Then one morning I came out and several of the growth tips had been neatly cropped off. I decided that was OK so long as those that were growing towards the inside of the fence weren't touched; the next morning those were gone too. We tried plastic netting but more disappeared so then we tried a spray-on compound known as liquid fence which seems to be working very well. It smells terrible when being sprayed but then the smell disappears. The company claims the deer can still smell it and apparently they can! So I should still have a lot of flowers. The picture is a bit hard to interpret--that's a chewed shoot on the right and a properly growing one on the left.

The fence painting--actually staining--went very well. All the plants--two roses and three hostas--did fine. Theo gets full credit for picking the color. And finally a shot of my patio flower pots--the incredibly bright green is a sweet potato vine; I quite like the effect and think (hope) that it will stand up better over time than my usual flower mixture does.