The Deer’s Lunch

Most coastal mornings on the ranch are overcast, the marine layer nestled low and heavy until well past ten. But this morning was clear. The newborn sun piercing through the oak leaves in pieces, casting a golden freckle over the sandy floor. The air still held a damp, crisp smell and morning birds peeped somewhere in the canopy. Below them, the dry leaf litter rustling and crackling, paper-thin, as something small worked through it looking for a snack in the moist soil beneath.

Nobody was out. Mornings like that are special to me. Especially there, on the property I grew up exploring. My mug warmed my fingertips. Steam lifted off the dark surface as it does from lake in the early hours. The calm before the storm. I headed out to the barn to see how things had weathered the night.

At the entry I had placed two pots, one on each side. The squatty container held a plant I have loved for years. The other, the tall focal pot, held Cuphea 'Hummingbird's Lunch,' a compact little shrub that caught my eye the second I saw it at the nursery. Cherry-red tubular flowers tipped with a touch of yellow, full of nectar. I had picked it on purpose. Soft, whimsical, alive. It would move in the breeze and it would pull hummingbirds into the middle of the event, which is the sort of detail I lose sleep over.

The cherry-red flowers that had stopped me at the nursery the day before… were gone.

Every leaf. Every flower. Stripped to the stems. tidy as a haircut.

Photo credit - Kolby Danielle Photo

Trim as turf.

Naked like… well, you know. THE STEMS WERE BARE!!

It had not just been the hummingbirds' lunch.

I stood there

took it in

and then I laughed

which surprised me.

I am not by temperament a person who laughs at this. I am a person who builds contingencies. I want the plan executed. I have a well known history of being difficult about details precisely because details are the thing I can control, and I have spent years learning, slowly (and not gracefully) that control is a much smaller territory than I keep assuming it is. Anyway.

I made a decision that felt right to me. I left them.

Sticks in a pot, right where the green stuff was supposed to be. Partly to see whether anyone would say anything. Mostly as a marker, because standing in front of that pot, I had a thought I have not been able to shake.

If there were no deer, it would not be the property I love.

A huge reason that land is worth pulling a hundred people on is that it is a beautiful, functioning piece of woodland on the coast in California. It has dappled shade because it has mature trees. It smells the way it does because things grow and decay there. It has leaf litter loud enough to hear from the path because nobody rakes it. It has deer because it can support deer. Take that apart in the same order and you get no canopy. No understory. Nothing rustling at seven in the morning. Nothing living there at all. The features I was so proud of and the animal that ruined my planting are the same fact about that place, observed from two different angles. I had gotten annoyed that my venue was working.

This is where I think a lot of designers get it wrong, and I include myself. We talk about landscapes as though they are compositions we finish. They are not. They are systems we enter partway through and leave before the end.

Plants get eaten. Gravel migrates. Decomposed granite tracks into the house. Something you specified for its form gets pruned into a meatball by someone who loves meatballs… I guess. The site keeps making decisions long after you have stopped making them.

I keep insisting that creativity is response rather than expression, and I have always meant responding to soil and slope and budget and how a family actually lives. It has to also mean responding to what comes after. To the deer, to the drought year, to the client who moves the pot six feet to the left because that is where she wanted it all along. A design that can only succeed under ideal conditions is not a design. It is a photograph.

The correct posture toward that is not resignation. It is humor, honestly.

The eaten plants did not stop the band from playing. They did not stop a hundred people from nibbling pizza under the moonlight. They did not stop a single conversation, if anything, they started them. Their total measurable effect on the evening was that I noticed them.

The photographer, who knew none of this, took one of my favorite images of the whole weekend. The sweetheart table, beautifully lit, with a pot of chewed-off sticks sitting in frame like it had been placed there on purpose.

And some of it survived. Off to the side somehow, untouched. During the ceremony, while my uncle was speaking, I looked over and there were hummingbirds sipping the flowers.

Almost nothing that breaks is load-bearing. Power is load-bearing. Parking, restrooms, seating, enough food. Nearly everything else is decoration you have gotten emotionally attached to, and the fastest way to find out which is which is to say out loud what the failure actually prevented. The answer is usually nothing.

When a natural system disrupts your plan, that system is generally the reason the place was worth being in.

I am still learning this one. I expect to be learning it for a long time. But I would rather host in a place where the deer come than in a place where nothing does.

What's the pot of sticks in your last project… and did it actually cost you anything?