Photos above (area #3 on the inset) are on the opposite side of the house as the grapevines. Walking out the front door and down a few steps, you’re facing the direction of the deer in the lower left photo. To head to most parts of the property, you’d turn right at the bottom of the steps and encounter the area the middle and right photos capture. It’s an area that we maintained as a circular drive when my teens and all their friends were frequent visitors and new drivers, but allowed to later naturalize into some inadvertently good deer forage. Birds planted raspberries and grapes in it, and there’s some kind of ornamental crab apple type tree, into whose shade I planted Soapwort and Lily of Valley. There are a few Nanking bushes here, too. There’s still a path around this spot, but it’s pedestrian only.
At the south end of the “circle” is a hidey-hole the deer used heavily in the early summer (inset pic on right above). The doe in the pics is munching what I affectionately call piss elm, one of two invasive trees on the property. I regularly whack it down. It regularly grows back. The deer’s munching doesn’t discernibly help deal with the elm, but at least it’s being put to some good use. I do think the deer have helped keep down the deep perimeter grass here in places that I can never fully manage for firewise purposes, laying and “walking it down” more than browsing it.
THE HERB CIRCLE
Below, the upper left photo is the area you encounter next, continuing toward the garden. It’s not a clump of mixed shrub and trees as it looks, but an open grove once you walk past the goldenrod and dogwood in the forefront of the photo. Lower left photo is the inside. There’s not much in there the deer munch on, but it’s large enough to serve as a more communal shelter spot. Does and fawns often holed up separately here, escaping heat or to rest or digest, but I saw does and fawns together in this spot regularly. It was originally an herb garden, and there are some great remnants left— noted on the pics— but the maturing trees here shaded much of it out. I like to weed it down every five years or so to see the original little walkways, center inset pic. It’s a nice place for humans to sit, too.
The last photo is the area outside of but directly next to the herb circle, which is quite open. It’s grassy, and there are two small ginko trees and an apple tree. Lots of laying around going on there at times. It’s adjacent to a blueberry planting, and it’s the spot where my son and I stumbled onto that rut in 2019 and where I stumbled on the little buck pictured above one day in 2021, again, a rare occurrence. In 2020, it was all eyes on covid, so who knows what was going on out there then.
Next: The Garden and South Field
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