First Gardening Casualty of the Year

Although it's not quite 2012 yet (still have an hour to go...).

I was checking on things on my land in Kansas a couple days ago and noticed that a tree I had planted earlier in the year, a tree that I carried gallons of water up a hill twice a week for the whole summer, was....gone.

Oh wait, there it is, flat on the ground.

It's not like there aren't thousands, thousands of other trees to choose from, big and little.

My pretty little "Cherokee Princess" dogwood was no more because of one bad bunny, or some other little varmint with overactive chewing equipment which gnawed around the trunk and then down into the roots.

I had this awful feeling that other things had happened while I was away (it had only been two weeks!). And.......they had. I had planted three little shortleaf pines (Pinus echinata) in a row and it was a regular Goldilocks situation with the three of them. One was left alone. One had a little bit of its side branches removed. And then there was one that had been sliced in two, totally destroyed.

The top was discarded and left on the ground.

The bottom was discarded in a sense too...because it had not been eaten either. Just a casual chew...for no reason. I don't think pines recover when their main leader is broken so that poor little tree is a goner. Bad deer. Bad, bad, bad deer.

However, the thimbleweeds (Anemone virginiana) I planted were doing just fine.

Even the ones that grow there naturally were untouched.

The Blackhaw Viburnum fruits from early November...

...were still there in late December.

Wahoo seeds? Nobody seemed to like them either.

Odd thing. I plant for wildlife but when the wrong wildlife gets in there and chomps them down, I get a bit peeved. I guess it's because those deer and bunnies are so darn thorough when they take things down, literally.

Another mystery was what was going on with the tomato cages I had used to mark other things I had planted in the woods. Nearly all of them had been pulled up and tossed. What the heck? Not sure who to blame on that one...bad raccoons or bad dogs who were not paying attention to where they were running.

Oh well, I had enough of brown plants, both living and not so much living, but all of that was forgotten on the drive home because things became extraordinarily colorful at sunset.

And to punctuate the prettiness, a check mark (not quite a "v") of geese flew across the pink spotted sky.

It's not the dramatic sunset you see in the southwest or the dramatic ones you see at a coast but what was happening behind me while I was driving away still had a lot of drama for a sunset happening on the "plains."

While I was taking pictures, an approaching car stopped because they felt compelled to watch the beautiful sunset too.

Even the place that Rex calls "the messy house" because of all the abandoned cars and trailers surrounding it, looked beautiful.

Not sure where I'm going with this but it did fortify me. If I can garden with turtles, I can garden with other animals that are compelled to take things down. They might have teeth but when I return, I will have chicken wire.