Please Send Hostas

Look at our hungry faces

Deer Gardeners,

We're not getting enough to eat here in Cameron's garden and we need your help. After you hear our pitiful story, we think you'll want to send us your hostas.

We live in the woods and sleep in the meadow beside Cameron's house. Our fawns are born here every year. With more than 25 members in our extended Meadow Deer Family, that's a lot of mouths to feed!

You see, the weather is just too hot to forage the countryside for food. We need delivery! 

Our little fawns are learning what's good and not good to eat and it so difficult to teach life's lessons without a generous buffet so that they can pick and choose.

In the last few days, we've sampled cosmos. It's definitely not one of our favorite foods, but we're getting desperate. The orange ones are really disgusting and we spit those out. But, the white and pink cosmos aren't too bad. Still, we're just taking the tops off and not destroying the plants. We see Cameron cutting the cosmos, so we think that makes the plant grow more blooms.

Cameron has so many clumps of swamp sunflowers, so we've been nibbling those the most. She doesn't seem to be too upset with us so far because she hasn't used any yucky smelly deer repellents or put up any fences.

We tried this swamp sunflower
(helianthus angustifolius)

We reach over the coneflowers and zinnias to eat the sunflowers. We hear some of our cousins up north eat coneflowers and zinnias, but we'd rather not try them until we're close to starving. The worse thing would be if Cameron decided to put up a fence!  Then, we couldn't walk through her garden every night to hang out on her patio and drink from her waterfall.

Cameron first blames the rabbits for any ground-level garden munching unless she can prove us guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. We've seen her chasing rabbits out of the garden several times a day. Charm has even pretended to chase the rabbits a few times! We have to laugh, because Charm is so harmless. She's never given us any trouble and we're rather amused since she looks like a bit like a deer wearing a tuxedo.

We did hear Cameron ranting loudly about the rabbits eating her candy lilies. She started those candy lilies from seeds two years ago and has been waiting for the blooms. We don't want to confess that we ate those, because the lilies are on most deer resistant plant lists and it is best to let her go on thinking that the rabbits ate the lilies.

Old Uncle Deermus is losing his sense of smell. He mistakingly ate a leaf on a small castor bean plant and we're anxiously waiting to hear how that worked out for him. We've heard that the seeds are poisonous.

So, you see, we're in dire straits. While Cameron's garden is filled with plants loved by bees, birds and butterflies, there's nothing for us to enjoy.

We desperately need your hostas. To make a donation to the Meadow Deer Family, please contact Cameron. No wait, she won't plant those! You'll have to drop off the hostas in the middle of the night. We'll be waiting.

Thank you,
Meadow Deer Family

Agastache, salvia, shastas, oh my! What's a deer to eat?

Words and photos by Freda Cameron, Defining Your Home, Garden and Travel. Deer and rabbit resistance varies based upon the animal population and availability of food. All company or product or patented names mentioned are registered trademarks, copyrights, or patents owned by those respective companies or persons.