Read by Michael Flamel

To quote Wikipedia (which, yes, I send a donation to every year because one) I use it a lot in my work and two) I grew up Catholic, which means I can match the guilt of any member of an ethnic or religious group on the planet): “The term hasta la vista ( lit. ‘until the view’) is a Spanish farewell that can generally be understood as meaning “Until the (next) time we see each other” or “See you later” or “Goodbye.”

And I haven’t mentioned Arnold Schwarzenegger yet; aren’t you proud of me? (Well, somebody has to be! Maybe.)

I have always grown hostas. (Detour: the plural of hosta is actually hosta, which makes it confusing to figure out if you’re talking about one plant or many. In addition, no one has ever managed to grow a single hosta—at least not for long—as they multiply faster than Mickey’s shattered broomstick in the Disney epic Fantasia. [Am I the only one who was terrified at the sight of America’s Favorite Mouse (admittedly a low bar; who’s in second place? Mighty Mouse?) looking like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” as he grabs a huge ax to attack the poor helpful water-hauling broomstick? Hey—wait a minute! Has anyone seen Minnie lately??!!]

This is because hostas (yes, I will add the technically-incorrects randomly from now on or we’ll be here all day), a treasured shade plant(s) that produces beautiful flower spikes mid-summer (a season that now arrives in late April in my climate-challenged garden*), each of which contains a gazillion seeds inside the pods that replace the faded purple flowers.
(*How whacked out has YOUR season been? It is early August as I pound these words into my helpless keyboard. We have already endured more – 90 degrees or above – heat waves than ever before, and today’s high is predicted to be 68 degrees. Time to start building that experimental rocket ship if you have an infant son.)
Now you could theoretically prevent this about-to-be over-population of hosta by cutting off the developing seed heads right after the flowers fade, but part of my ‘let the birds feed themselves’ philosophy prevents this (as does laziness) as birds of all kinds love to dine on the seeds inside those pods, and since they seem to enjoy living in a front yard teeming with free food (If I get up early enough I hear a sunrise symphony every morning. Yes, that’s a big ‘if’. I’m a small-scale farmer who likes to sleep in, which turns out exactly the way you might expect.)

Anyway, the boids hang around and poop out the contents of those pods, which evolve into about a hundred new hostas per head the following season. (If only the stuff I planted deliberately germinated so well!)

Over the years, this led to an impenetrable jungle of hostas, a sight which is amazing when they flower, but not so much the other eleven months of the year. We eventually recovered/created a walkway through the front yard by ‘selectively’ (i.e. viciously) weed whacking about 80 percent of the plants early in the Spring (and every other week thereafter until frost).
As the years went by, we got pretty good at this, creating big islands of hosta (it seems to make sense here) that look darned deliberate, with amply wide walking lanes in between; essentially planting in reverse: let it all grow and then kill what you don’t want. (I think I’ll try that with my cherry tomatoes next year.)

Hostas have two natural enemies: slugs, which love to nibble on their (presumably) tasty leaves, and deer, for whom hostas are a four-star gourmet meal.

The first time I realized that my method of gardening was a gladiator sport occurred one year when I was admiring my food garden (on the other side of the driveway from the hosta farm) in June. (Hint: if your garden doesn’t look good in June, take up woodworking, cause it’s all downhill after that. Nobody schedules a garden tour in August, by which time you have given up and the weeds are beginning to receive mail.)

Anyway, a rogue clump of hostas had set up camp at the front edge of the food garden, right next to a tree stump that also served the birds’ sanitary needs. (Who decided that ‘sanitary’ was a synonym for a place where you disposed of poop [as in highway signage that alerts you to ‘sanitary facilities ahead]? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? “Unsanitary facilities ahead; be sure to wash your hands afterwards!”)

But there was something strange about this clump. I was viewing it from the center of the garden, and the big leaves looked fine. Then I went out in front of the clump and saw that what at first appeared to be a big circle of hosta was more like the part of a saloon you see in a Western movie—without the lumber holding up the fake front. As someone once said, ‘There’s no there there.” (Well, somebody must have said it by now. Or maybe it was those monkeys attempting to write Shakespeare.)

I realized that slugs don’t eat that fast—and there were no distinctive slug holes in the remaining leaves. That left deer. Clever deer that had tried to fool me by leaving ten percent of the clump standing! (“He’ll never notice!”)

Thus began my war with the endless stomachs on legs, at one point surrounding the food garden with corrugated steel panels laid flat on the ground because I had been told that deer didn’t like walking on them. Well, neither did I (They provide an exceptionally not-soft landing area.) and so I moved on, eventually settling on a motion-activated sprinkler mounted on a tripod at the back of the garden, looking like the Martian war machines in H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” but lacking their deadly heat ray, which seems a loss until you realize it would have controlled my tomatoes as well as the deer.

And thus was detente achieved in the food garden, except when I didn’t realize the batteries were dead and/or turned it off because I needed to work in the garden without the senior citizen version of running through the sprinkler.

Never thought about the front garden, which had lots of bulbs bursting in the Spring—including tulips which are supposedly a favorite food of deer. And voles. And mice. And Evil Squirrels, which not only ate some of my underground bulbs but replaced them with black walnuts, which don’t bloom well in the Spring.

And so it was this Spring: lots of snowdrops, Glory of Snow and crocus; followed by a plethora of daffodils (my favorite bulb because it is bitter tasting and toxic and untouched by any otherwise bulb-eating creature. When I can’t fall asleep at night I doze off to the thought of Evil Squirrels trying to eat them. While jumping over a fence. “One unhappy Evil Squirrel; Two unhappy…”).

And these, of course, are followed by the tulips—and follow they did! Yes, there are fewer of them every Spring, but it’s also been a couple of decades since I planted any new ones, so the sight of these survivors still fills me with joy.

This year’s hostas, however, did not fill me with joy—mostly because there weren’t any. One morning I awoke and noticed something different about the front garden, which I would say was nothing (to see, that is), but there were signs of what was and was yet to be. (Or, more correctly, what would have been to be.)

It looked like somebody had ordered a couple hundred servings of Buffalo Wings and stuck all the celery sticks in the ground instead of pretending to eat them.

(PS: If you ever wondered where the Buffalo in Buffalo Wings comes from, the answer is Buffalo, New York, where the dish is credited with being created [when the restaurant had way too many chicken scraps left over at the end of the night, so they breaded and deep fried them (which works with a LOT of leftovers)]. Lord only knows where the celery sticks came in; probably because nobody wanted to eat them either. Hey! They should have breaded and deep fried them as well! (Although something about “Buffalo Sticks” just doesn’t seem right.)

Despite having no leaves my Pennsylvania Sticks have persisted until Fall (which, as I have already noted, arrived in early August this year). Makes you wonder what Christmas will be like.
But now that the deer have Visted my Hosta, what does next year bring? Theoretically, a perennial that loses all its leaves early in the season will not flower the following year. But does that apply to a perennial whose growth rate puts kudzu to shame?

My money is on the “see you later” translation. It’s the deer I wish I could tell “goodbye!”

And now excuse me while I buy another motion-activated sprinkler… ❖