Your Home, Garden and Travel

I love to eat blazing star leaves.

Here I am, nibbling on the blazing star (liatris ligulistylis) while posing for my photo. This wildflower, blazing star, is a favorite nectar flower for Monarch butterflies. I think the leaves are yummy.

I live in Cameron's deer resistant garden. I'm so cute and I hide out beneath the amsonia, monarda and agastache that is planted so thickly, Cameron can't run me out. There's always a place for me to hide.

There's another perennial that I love to eat so much. It was blooming all summer, but now, linaria 'Canon J. Went' is nothing but stubs. Those pretty little pink snapdragon-shaped blooms are all gone. I have such a voracious appetite that I finished off the entire plant in three nights!

Cameron caught me munching on a coneflower leaf. She asked me not to do that anymore or she'll spray bunny repellent on all the coneflower leaves. That stuff really tastes yucky, so I'm going to have to be really sneaky and just eat the coneflower leaves that she won't notice. She has so many rudbeckia 'Goldsturm' that I'm able to eat those leaves without making her mad.

Although I live out in the deer resistant garden where there are a lot of plants that I don't eat (agastache, salvia, milkweed, joe pye weed, ironweed, amsonia, monarda, perennial heliotrope and coreopsis—to name a few), I do sneak into the cottage garden to see if I can reach the garden phlox.

I trampled some sedum tips the other day. That didn't go over very well with the gardener. Cameron had just planted those tips and I walked all over them so that I could eat a perennial that she calls "wine cups." It had been planted in the cottage garden, right beside the path. She moved it a few weeks ago to hide it from me. I thought it was a game of hide-and-seek. I found it behind those sedum tips and I just had to eat it again. I won the game!

I would really like to be a pet. Cameron and Charm walk through the garden every morning. I try to follow along, but they pretend to chase me off. I've managed to go up and sniff Cameron's shoes, but she isn't amused by my cuteness. She says I'm a wild animal and people shouldn't touch me.

I'm so cute, but I've been told that people shouldn't touch me.

Words and photos by Freda Cameron, Defining Your Home, Garden and Travel. Deer and rabbit resistance varies based upon the animal population and availability of food.