Stargazing with Deer

When our son married Michelle, I bought a huge bundle of stargazer lilies to grace the fellowship hall for the church reception. The exquisite beauty of the pink speckled lilies and their incredibly sweet fragrance seemed the perfect expression of how happy we were to receive Michelle into our family. They were a novelty to me, being more accustomed to Mother’s lemon lilies and tiger lilies, and Grandma Myra’s fancy triple daylilies.

About that time I bought a dozen stargazer bulbs and planted them beside the main entrance to our house.  Year after year, they bloomed in amazing profusion, hanging their beautiful pink blossoms over the porch railing.  I don’t know how many times I had to go back into the house and change my clothes, on the way to an event, because I brushed against the potent orange pollen inside the lily blooms.  Arranging them in the house, I always regretfully removed the dramatic stamens that were dripping with it.

My stargazer lilies were often in full bloom for Michelle’s midsummer birthday, and it was a joy to take her a bouquet of them year after year.

And then, a herd of marauding deer changed everything.

I was horrified one morning to find that every plump bursting stargazer bud had been chomped off overnight. There were no lilies for Michelle that year or for many years to come.

The food cravings of deer were a brand new problem.  Living here for several decades, we had never seen a deer.  Then I remember one magical night around midnight—it happened to be my birthday—my grown kids woke me up to look out the window to see deer grazing on acorns under the oaks in the light of the streetlamps.  I was enchanted.

That was until things began to disappear, like the stargazer lilies.  Other yummy deer treats were apparently the red impatiens that I loved to amass in the shade around the front door.  They disappeared as if they were strawberries on shortcake, forget the whipped cream!

It began to feel like the grocery-intensive era when our kids were seniors and could drive home for lunch from Menchville High School. Robby came home unexpectedly once and found six or eight hungry teens in the kitchen grazing from the refrigerator.  Particularly painful for him was the sight of one girl with an iced tea spoon eating his favorite Breyers Ice Cream right out of the container.

The deer were here to stay, and to be truthful, we were providing food, water, and shelter for wild animals, so we had only ourselves to blame.  We began encouraging daisies and coneflowers that came back year after year, instead of using flats of purchased bedding plants in our yard.  If the deer nipped a plant or two, we didn’t even notice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then this spring I noticed a lily growing in an odd spot where I had not planted anything.  I was pretty sure it was a stargazer lily, harking back somehow to my abundant plants a decade ago.  As the buds fattened on the little plant, I began to get nervous.  There were deer footprints in the lower garden, but this plant had so far escaped.

Last night I couldn’t stand it, seeing the fat pink bud offering itself up to the night unprotected.  I got a few feet of Lisa’s floating row cover and wrapped up the flower head with it.  The lily plant looked like someone who had just stepped out of the shower.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This morning—what delight!—I pulled off the row cover and there was one gorgeous stargazer lily.  It was a little late for Michelle’s birthday, and it looked somewhat lonely by itself, but it had survived to enchant and gladden, just one more miracle in the garden.