There’s a forty-year-old tree in front of our house. The limbs scrape the roof of my car when I back out of the garage. We haven’t bothered to prune it the last few years.
I began to notice a few twigs were down. Then the next week I happened to notice the driveway was littered with twigs. And not individual twigs, more like the last six inches of foliage off everything. Like someone had just randomly attacked the tree with hedge clippers. Snip snip snip.
Or, chew , chew, chew. A few weeks later the lawn guy told Gary that deer were eating our trees and bushes.
“Cool!” Gary said.
“Deer can really damage your landscaping.”
“We love deer!”
I was not there to say, “I am not buying new shrubs to please the deer when they could be eating from a backyard full of shelled peanuts.” When Gary told me about the exchange later he explained how it was vital to a deer’s health that it get enough roughage in the form of trees and shrubs.
I thought, “Well, at least they’ll chew off the limbs that scrape the top of my car.”
Since we have established the all you can eat deer policy, the tree no longer scrapes on my car, but exactly one of our four yew bushes has turned golden brown. I could cut it down, because I know the others would fill in the gap, or I could live with a brown bush until spring when I am fairly certain the yew would come back green. It’s hard to kill a forty year old yew.
One thing I know I won’t be able to do is act like I’m at the top of the food chain and spray deer repellent on the bushes. Gary now wants to put trays of chestnuts by the landscaping to see if they’d prefer nuts to bushes.
Also, “I think my deer would like to eat my bush more than my husband’s nuts” … yes, I am aware of how it sounds.
2 responses to “The Buffet”
You don’t mean you think the deer are eating the yew, do you? It’s poisonous, to horses anyway. It was a dramatic climax in one of my favourite books as a kid that one character got out of her wheelchair to remove a fallen branch from her pony’s reach. Kids’ lit was so innocent in those days…
Big Dot – It would seem they can eat the Densiformis yew bushes I have. The Wikipedia article about yew says deer have adapted to eat it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxus#Morphology). I did find a Better Homes and Gardens article that said to plant a Japanese plum yew instead: deers avoid those. The Missouri botanical site puts deer on their “yew problems’ page. That was interesting, that page explains why the deer ate at all the bushes but only one died: it’s the one with the least drainage (rainiest season ever).