I have to start with a defense of men. I don't know any men who don't have a fine sense of color. Of course, I don't know any men who go nuts over football games on TV either, so I may be dealing with a more specific set of men than most people. They also accept the fact that I want what I want. When I've asked women to mix special colors for me in a paint store, I've often received unwanted advice: "That orange is too dark for a bedroom." "Don't you want more gray in that blue?" "I hope that's a big room because that teal is too bright." I put a lot of thought into my color schemes and I don't need input from some lady who might still have avocado green and harvest gold appliances.
Now for the gopher story. I've never been able to grow any bulbs other than daffodils unless I cage them or grow them in containers. I can't even grow them as annuals uncaged in the ground because the gophers eat them before they can bloom.
The gophers also love roses. I remember I once lost more than 30 roses in a single week years ago. The cages were $5 and most of my roses cost less than that, so I couldn't justify the use of the cages. The wastebaskets worked for a while, but there were no holes in the bottom, so the roses eventually were stunted.
About six years ago, I started planting my new roses in cages. I bought about 200 cages at $5 apiece. Then I found a guy who made them for me for $2.50 apiece and I started digging up my old surviving roses and replanting them in the cages. According to my records, I bought 1200 from him and they're all gone, so you can imagine how much digging and replanting I had to do. I didn't have to do anything for my roses grafted onto multiflora and fortuniana. For some reason, those rootstocks don't appeal to gophers, so I'm glad I bought so many of my roses from Canadian nurseries and the nurseries in the southern states that use Rosa fortuniana for grafting. The gophers only like own-root roses and roses grafted onto Dr. Huey.
About 100 own-root or Dr. Huey-grafted roses in my garden are still uncaged. Some are too big to replant and some aren't appealing enough to be worth the effort. I've lost 4 of those in the last couple of weeks.
The shortage of roses for lunch has made the gophers less discriminating in their tastes. They're suddenly eating the irises that have been untouched here for years.
