It's Only Excessive If You Keep it All

I suppose I should take it as a compliment.  After all, the stretching stems and healthy leaves look beautiful -- and tasty -- to me.  The rogue rabbit or two breaching the defenses have long since weighed in with their opinion.  But last evening, while enjoying dinner in the sunroom overlooking the garden, Lori spotted a deer -- first on one side of the fence, then beside the garden shed, and before long inside the fence.  I have known from the outset that my flimsy little fence represented precious little defense -- more of a comfort to me than a deterrent to anything that really wanted in.  And deer had explored the garden space all winter.  This, however, was the first encroachment of which I have been aware during growing season.

I am perhaps over-zealous.  Down the road from us just a little way is a farmhouse with a nice size garden situated between the house and the vast acres of crop rows.  Wide open; not a stick of anything erected to keep anything away.  It is the portrait of horticultural hospitality -- as if to broadcast, "come and get it; supper's almost ready."  From the looks of the house and the field and the garden itself, they have been at it considerably longer than I have, and quite likely know something I do not about the vicissitudes of garden sharing.  Maybe it is the drift of pesticide from the fields nearby at which the rodents and rabbits and deer turn up their noses.  Maybe it is a corollary to the ancient parenting wisdom that "kids" only want what they can't have, and are completely disinterested in that which is freely available.  Or perhaps they have a rifle perched in the window.  I'll be watching through the season to see what I can observe.

We, on the other hand, sprang into action -- Lori first, flying out the door to the deck to clap her hands and speak a loud and discouraging word.  Ex-principals are good at that sort of thing.  The deer paused its culinary survey, returned Lori a sullen stare, and finally obliged -- leaping from a standing start and effortlessly clearing the fence, then sauntering without concern into the woods.

No doubt to return sometime after dark.

Perhaps, as with the poison ivy that has begun to trouble us, it is a not-so-subtle reminder that we are not in charge here.  We share this place with nature -- which, of course, was something of the point of moving here.  We co-exist -- sometimes happily, sometimes bucolically, sometimes symbiotically, and as just now, sometimes competitively.  The challenge, I suspect, is less about prevailing -- "winning" in any conventional sense -- and more about adapting; finding here, even in the garden, some expression of common space.

As I have confessed from the beginning:  I don't "know" anything about what I am doing out here -- other than this humbling recognition of how much I need to know.  I was prepared for the books and the mentors and the internet and seed packets to teach me.  It hadn't occurred to me that the wildlife would take their turn at the podium as well.

Perhaps that's the real reason I have planted excessively:  because I will need to share.