Buggy Garden

Lexington Herald-Leader 03/23/2006 Author's gardening ideal full of bugs
Next time, William Alexander thinks, his book might be more about the food and less about his garden.
But The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden is more about the Hudson Valley garden that threatened to scuttle Alexander's otherwise placid existence. (Sumptuous photos of said garden are available at Alexander's Web site, 64dollartomato.com.)
In the book, he battles a scheming woodchuck, swarms of Japanese beetles, lawn grubs -- and don't even get him started about the deer that saw his fresh veggies as a buffet.
Well, OK, do get him started about the deer, because Alexander is about as entertaining as anyone you're ever going to hear on the subject of those fuzzy, wide-eyed terrors of the gardener's existence.
"An Eastern white-tailed deer in the wild is a beautiful thing. They're graceful, they're strong leapers, they're beautiful things," Alexander says.
What's not to love?
"A deer eating your garden stubble or plastered on the windshield or giving you Lyme."
Alexander thinks the dangers of Lyme disease -- a flulike illness caused by a bacterium and transmitted to humans by the bite of infected black-legged ticks, which are maintained, carried and shed by your friend Mr. Bambi -- are underrated by deer apologists. He blames the rather pleasant name: Lyme, unlike the ominous-sounding "West Nile virus," has a sort of New England-y Olde Towne feel about it. It sounds more like a resort than a disease.
But the experience of shunning deer and declaring war on Japanese beetles has taught more