Without further ado, essay 1, part 1.
Over Christmas break last year, my
now-husband and I sat down with a sheet of graph paper and planned a rose bed. He
had just purchased a house in Elm Heights and was excited to begin gardening. David
Austin catalogue in hand, we sketched a long, narrow bed along the south side
of the house, between a steep slope and the street. Our plan was to create a
hedge of roses and other shrubs—butterfly bushes and Russian sage—that would
attract butterflies and bees, provide a colorful screen for the rest of the
garden, and add to the neighborhood’s beauty. We selected three roses for this
purpose: L.D. Braithwaite, which we planned to plant at the centre of the row
because of its tall growth pattern; Evelyn, which we selected for its
incredibly delicious perfume, and Pat Austin, which we chose for its rich
copper-peach blooms.
On a foggy day in early April, the
roses arrived. They were bare-root, so of course we had to soak them. They made
our big blue recycling bin look like an aquarium full of very odd, rather
ferocious horned beasts. The next day my husband planted them. Pat Austins at
the ends of the row, in two clumps—they form low, mounding bushes—Braithwaites
in the middle of the row, and Evelyns between the two. With mounting
anticipation we watched them sprout their first leaves, then their first buds.
The canes shot up remarkably quickly, and by the beginning of May our initial
vision was already a reality: a lovely screen of warmly-hued rose blossoms,
punctuated by the cooler colors and sparser vegetation of interspersed Russian
sage and buddleia.
My first inkling of trouble ahead
came when Scott and I met up with some friends at the farmers’ market early in
May. When I asked him why he was out-of-sorts, he responded with one word:
“Deer.” Overnight, deer—probably the doe and her two fawns that we had seen in
the back yard before—had eaten flowers, buds, and leaves, decimating the young
bushes. “I don’t even see the point,” Scott growled.
Bloomington’s deer population is not
limited to our garden, of course. Articles in the Herald-Times have discussed the issue for years now. The Deer Task
Force ruffled feathers when it hinted that its proposed solution to the deer
problem would be luring them with clover traps and then culling the herd with
sharpshooters[1]. Letters
to the Editor were one way for residents to express their disgust with this suggestion;
alternative web outlets broadened the public forum[2].
To some, the task force has it backward; humans have invaded deer territory,
not the other way around, so urban deer should come as no surprise.
Reading
Michael Pollan’s Second Nature, I saw
this issue at first as a particularly American one. Pollan portrays Americans, who
have carved their plots out of the howling wilderness, as feeling a deep-seated
tension between their democratic struggle to subdue the land—symbolized by the
suburban lawn—and Romantic theories about the sublime beauty of untouched
nature. To the first group, the lawn is a display of our ability to impose our power
on the land[3].
Deer, to these gardeners, might be seen as an invasion, an intrusion on human
society. In the other camp is Thoreau—an author with whom those on the side of
the deer might sympathize—who suggests that humans should share their space and
their bounty with squirrels, woodchucks, and deer, leaving nature’s systems
untouched and ideal.[4]
[1] Joint City of Bloomington-Monroe County Deer
Task Force.“Deer: Lethal Approaches.” The
City of Bloomington. City of Bloomington, n.d. Web. 7 September 2012. http://bloomington.in.gov/deertaskforce#predators.
[2] Steven Higgs.
“Deer hunts come to Bloomington.” The
Bloomington Alternative. The Bloomington Alternative, 30 June 2012. Web. 7
September 2012. http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2012/06/30/10976.
[3] Pollan,
Michael. Second Nature. New York:
Grove Press, 1991. 62.
[4] Thoreau, Henry
David. Walden. “The Bean Field.” New
York: Penguin, 1986. 200-212.
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