Gardening Column: Living with deer undeserved punishment …

Now that we’ve covered most of the mundane but necessary tasks of spring, we can begin to think of what’s in bloom now — and what we might wish were in bloom now. And when we move in that direction, we do have to stop and think about the velociraptors of Shelter Island, otherwise known as the deer herd.

Assessing your own particular  “deer problem” is dicey; just as all politics are local, your own deer situation is not only local but also inconstant. It’s quite possible to be safe one summer and chomped to the nubbies the next — a single family of deer changing their location can easily be your undoing.

This situation is further complicated by catalogues, nurseries and garden centers telling you what is and what isn’t “deer proof.”

The whole concept of “deer proof” is basically absurd; a starving deer will eat anything. When I first gardened here, rhododendrons and most other evergreens were deer proof. Now? Forget about it.

Basically, you can’t believe anyone, except perhaps your next door neighbor. It’s true that some plant material tends to be left alone; deer don’t eat daffodils, for example, but baby deer haven’t always heard about that and find it out by trial and error. Again deer don’t “eat” ornithogalum, one of the first of the spring bulbs to bloom and therefore truly welcomed. Unfortunately, I believed this and one fall I planted a whole slope of them, imagining what a joyful sight they would be the following spring. Now it’s true that the deer didn’t actually eat them but they did pull them up out of the ground, leaving them strewn on the hillside, drying out in the sun, presumably in a fit of massive pique that the menu was not to their liking.

Then there’s timing; what’s deer proof after the woods have leafed out may not be deer proof in late spring.

So I now have what I think of as “protected areas” and “unprotected areas.” Our protected area is large and most of the passionate gardeners I know have discovered ways of fencing that work. Because I hate the “prison camp” look, the barbed wire around individual shrubs, I confine what I fear the deer will browse, to say nothing of destroy totally, to my fenced-in space. In my unprotected space, out by the road and close to the front of the house, I try for plant material that leafs out late, and experiment on a small scale with anything new. For the first time last fall, I planted some allium, often referred to as “flowering onions.”

Allium is Latin for garlic and alliums are considered deer proof; you’re probably familiar with the variety featuring the single, huge purple head of bloom. I think of these as ungainly, to put it mildly, and have never imagined a setting in which they might work, other than a cutting garden if you wanted to bring them in as cut or dried flowers. However, browsing through a catalog last year, “Beauty from Bulbs,” the John Scheepers catalog, which features really wonderful illustrations, I came across pages of alliums and a couple looked really nice. Thinking that the deer might not like them, I bought a few Allium cowanii. Well, they’re up and in bloom and I think they’re gorgeous. Go online, have a look! My Scheepers catalog is from 2010, but back then you could buy 50 of them for less than $10. How much more expensive could they be two years later? I’m going for the 50 this fall. I’ll keep you posted.