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A Tasty Brown Gazebo
By Ursula B.G. Kilner, Salisbury
I have long thought of the gazebo as a Victorian symbol of summer. A rather secluded small building open, but screened, where tea was sipped and birds chirped on the grass around the building. That is all well and good, and I never considered having a gazebo. One never knows!
A dear friend had to move from a "tied cottage" on a large farm and she had bought a gazebo many years before for a daughter's wedding ceremony. The gazebo, of course, has no cellar and is not considered a "permanent" structure. My friend wanted to move the gazebo before she moved, as she really did not want to leave it to the next owner of the property. So I bought it from her and she arranged to have it moved to Bird Bottom Farm. It arrived one evening on a flatbed and was arranged on the grass across the "sometime" brook. (New England specializes in brooks that run on their own schedules, but they’re still nice to have.)
We thought the gazebo could use a coat of paint, a nice brown which would blend it into the trees. I hied to the hardware store and bought what I thought was the best paint, Benjamin Moore's most expensive outside paint. My, the gazebo looked elegant painted brown, and it did blend with the trees around it. But there was some mysterious element in the paint. The squirrels loved the paint and chewed it away from the boards and trim with persistent and devoted work. (Their teeth may be small, but squirrels can do a barrel of trouble when they start on a project—and this the furry rascals did.) Maybe just one found the paint's taste delicious; nonetheless, all dozens of squirrels joined in the fun.
I called the hardware store and explained what had happened and they let the Benjamin Moore salesman hear about it. What happened? Nothing. I called the Benjamin Moore company and asked right out: "Have you put squirrel-nip on the order of catnip in the paint?" I fear my flip question belied my serious upset over the work that had been done and the squirrel-eaten look of the gazebo; it would have been better had it been left weatherworn. Benjamin Moore's spokesperson assured me they would send a "sales rep" to see the damage. He, of course, never appeared. The hardware store tried again to no avail. I wanted either another batch of paint (maybe another color wouldn't be so tasty to the squirrels) or a refund for what had been spent on the "new look." Neither was forthcoming.
So in the fall the door was painted white another with another manufacturer’s product to see if that tempted the squirrels’ appetites. Come spring the door was still pristine white with nary a tooth mark on it. So now it is white and doesn't blend in with the trees around it, and the roof is a hunter green. Not what I had imagined, but if it is squirrel-proof I can live with it. I shall take some iced tea and sit in the gazebo and think Victorian thoughts, although I do not plan to wear one of those six-layered Victorian dresses for the occasion.
This experience reminds me of the labor I put into bringing violets to a bed near the house. The violets, including a few yellow ones which I treasured, looked just as I had imagined, beautiful. The next morning I went out to admire them and my handiwork and was in shock. The deer, who could eat all the violets for acres in the woods, had come down in the night and demolished my violet bed. Somehow the feeling of "wild creatures don't like me" crept across my mind. I expect "the wild ones" to eat bulbs, strawberries, lilies, roses, and many other garden treasures … but wild violets? Needless to say, I have not moved any more violets, and what grows grows.
Perhaps the cavalier treatment I (and the hardware store) got from the Benjamin Moore paint company developed from their knowledge the company was about to be sold. Maybe the new management will read this and change the paint formula—after first consulting some squirrels so the same tantalizing taste which was in the paint is removed and replaced by a repellent which targets squirrels. The only trouble with that is they might add something which tempts chipmunks. No, I shall stick with the white paint of a different company, as obviously they do not have any tasty additives.
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