Sunflowers post-recovery. The groundhog's shed in the background. Photo: Alice Rossignol
Our landlord warned us that a beefy groundhog lived underneath the shed in the backyard.
But we started our very first garden anyway.
We cleared a patch of land and started everything from sweat and seeds: pumpkins, basil, tomatoes, carrots and sunflowers.
And surprisingly everything grew, sucking up sun rays and spitting out chlorophyll, until the possibility of homegrown veggies was nearly a reality.
Then the groundhog crawled out from his cave.
He spared the tomatoes and pumpkins, but mowed down the sunflowers and carrots like a freshly clipped golf course. He cut down weeks of hard, slow growth in a matter of seconds.
I never shared my parent’s anguish as they battled deer and gophers that destroyed their garden in Oregon for nearly a decade. Feeling an emotional connection to plants was never on my radar.
But now it was. And this wasn’t a time to be passive.
Fencing, boards and bricks - our first attempted defenses. Photo: Alice Rossignol
So we built up our defenses and settled in for the long haul.
We dug trenches installing planks of wood, wire cages and steel rods. I wound fencing and spiny pumpkin vines around the perimeter.
But the groundhog was surprisingly cunning and acrobatic.
Too many mornings I was greeted with scenes of attempted murder as once recovering plants were chopped down again.
The garden began to look more like a Mordor fortress with layers of reclaimed material and junk found in our neighbor’s yard. I tried a little person-to-groundhog “let’s talk this out” time while peering into its lair. My boyfriend caught me spying out the kitchen window to catch the groundhog red-pawed.
I didn’t know that a garden could be such a binding, emotional contract.
But eventually the battle ran its course. We finally made it to harvest with some vegetables to show for it. And the groundhog got his fill.
For some reason it felt like a true win-win situation even though I’d spent far too many hours mourning over lost plants and obsessing over my next defense strategy.
I realized that growing a garden was more than just an end product but involved different victims and heroes, tactics and a certain spirit of the game. And after the final buzzer I had no hard feelings – especially for the players.