Remember the picture I put up, of the restored border, with its three rows of Icebergs underplanted with Diascia rigescens? Beautiful it looked, I admit -
Arriving at this point with a bunch of information-hungry adherents, I descended into confessional mode, feeling forced to admit that whatever success they were looking at, it had come about as a result of addressing a series of failures. In the process, it gave me the opportunity to put some myths to the sword and have a bit of a laugh.
That picture above, with its perfect harmony of pink and white, was realised to such perfection only once, and there were a couple of contributing factors in this. Firstly, the Diascia was not reliably hardy through our cold, wet, exposed winters, and secondly we had deer. Not deliberately, mind you. We didn't ask for them. They just came, uninvited, probably through the back gate like some of our visitors. They certainly didn't pay, and like the worst visitors, went away with plant material collected against our stipulations.
Anyway, the picture above was taken in the first summer, after a spring planting of strong Diascias bought in from a specialist nursery. The following winter they had come through well, and were about to flower simultaneously with the roses, when over a few consecutive nights the deer stripped every last rose-bud from the plants. That year we had Diascias, followed much later by a second flush of roses, but no splendid intermingling. This disappointed me after the success of the first year, and I resolved to do something about it, so I started researching recommended methods of deterring deer, other than sitting up all night with a rifle.
The alternatives which presented themselves to me were a mixed bag of mythological nonsenses which far too many people seem to subscribe to.
Number 1 - lion dung. I used ask my audience where the local native south of England deer would gain the experience of predatory African wild cats to develop a sense of terror on merely encountering their dung? I think it's a reasonable, if over-wordy, question. OK. You might argue that they could tell from the dung that it came from a carnivore, and that might make their sphincter twitch and put them to flight, but I would counter that with a further doubt. If that were the case, I would suggest, then why didn't they sprint like the clappers on sniffing the cat-shit that the house moggy used to half-bury in my lovely borders for my hands to find? Even Whiskas smells of meat, I surmise.
Number 2 - human hair. Well, this one deserved instant dismissal, on the grounds that any astute deer would give our garden a wide berth on account of my nearly waist-length beard, if human hair were an effective deterrent. Hey - and what would it look like, hanging from the thorns?
Number 3 - scented soap. What? Apparently, some people believe that if you hang scented soap in your bushes it will deter deer. On what grounds? The perfume covering up the fragrant temptation of the lovely succulent buds? Unlikely, I thought. And wouldn't you have a border full of bubbles during thunderstorms?
Come on, let's get realistic. I had a think about it. All the above is nonsense, yet still zoos are making a good few bob selling lion poo to the unwary. What was I going to do? Lay aside my scepticism, or find a valid alternative? I went for the latter.
It was the scented soap that gave me the idea. I considered it tangentially. Knowing that the smell was unlikely to have any effect whatsoever, I turned it on its head. At this point I would digress to discuss the merits of soap in a garden context. I would point out that we do indeed have a use for soft soap, as protection against aphids allowable to organic gardeners. I would ask if anybody knew how it worked. Sometimes people would know the answer or would hazard lucky guesses. I put it to them that the way it worked was that the soap was sticky, and aphids, having six legs, were very susceptible to it, as with all those limbs covered in gunk, they couldn't move around so well, and it just looked as if they were doing less damage on account of restricted mobility. Most listeners got that I was pulling their legs (!), and now and then, some deadly serious person would call out, 'it's not that! they breathe through the pores of their skin, and the soap reduces the surface tension of the water, allowing it to penetrate, effectively drowning them'. That's all very well, but it's a bit prosaic and overly scientific, so I preferred to stick with the critically disabled insect version, however false it might be. Let's face it, it's no more stupid than believing deer will hide from imaginary lions.
Anyway, I am actually a bit brighter than I sometimes portray myself, and putting two and two together like an accomplished mathematician, I came to the conclusion that the soft soap could work against deer, if we got away from the idea of the scent, and concentrated on the taste. I was working on the old child-care strategy of washing kids' mouths out with soap if they used bad words. It tastes bloody awful. I know this.
So, the year after our disastrous mistiming of the flowering, I resolved to try out a new idea. The deer like the buds when they are young and green, any time before they show colour, so I would spray the roses with soapy water every evening after the buds developed until I could see the whites of their eyes, in the process zapping the greenfly, and killing two turds with one bone. Lo! and behold! after the first night when a few buds had been nibbled at at one end of the bed, my diligence was rewarded, and the deer caused no further damage. The roses no longer tasted nice. Simple as that. Unfortunately, our Diascias hadn't survived the winter well, and we had had to replace them with weak young plants grown by ourselves in cramped conditions in the greenhouse, and these took a while to bulk up in the ground, so that year we had roses followed by Diascias and the twain never met.
But for a tangential thinker, there is always a solution, and I eventually did away with the Diascias altogether, replacing them with Verbena rigida, a low-growing version of the ubiquitous Verbena bonariense in appearance, but spreading nicely amongst the roses by means of stolons. They provided superb ground cover at just the right height, and were reliably hardy in our conditions. I found them so successful and so attractive that I replicated the scheme in the last garden I worked in several years later. Want to see what their first incarnation looked like?
The nice bit was that I was able to repeat the motif in the border below to lend harmony to the whole -
Even when the roses were having a mid-term rest in August, the Verbenas continued to provide colour and interest -
And finally, a romantic close-up to leave you contented and reinvigorated for tomorrow's post, which will take us in another direction. Photograph courtesy of volunteer photographer Ray Woodham, a fine man I am still in touch with -
Oh, and by the way, did you know, in the context of the above, that if you want to keep stray dogs out of your garden, all you have to do is pee on your fence? Same product is supposed to cure mildew in gooseberries too. Just gooseberries? I ask myself, sceptically.
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