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A wail drifted up the slope from where I could see that Gretchen was on her knees. I knew the family members were all well, so it couldn’t be that we’d lost a loved one. Then what was the reason for the keening?

As I approached, Gretchen turned to me with a look of anguish.

“The rhubarb. The deer ate the rhubarb. But they don’t eat rhubarb. The leaves are poisonous.”

Yet the evidence was there. The rhubarb, which had been flourishing so that we were planning a rhubarb pie, was chewed off and there was a ring of cloven hoof prints neatly planted around the patch in the soft earth.

I went to fetch some hoops and Gretchen gathered some deer netting so we could protect what remained of our rhubarb patch. We have grown rhubarb for many years without seeing it ravaged, and we’ve read that deer avoid it. Now it was obvious that deer do not always avoid rhubarb.

That seems to be the experience of others as well, according to postings on the Internet, such as the following from a garden advice column by Terry Hockey in “Making Your Landscape More Deer Repellent”:

“A woman recently called asking for plants that deer don’t like and then proceeded to tell me how the deer had eaten her rhubarb right to the ground. Now everyone knows that rhubarb leaves are extremely poisonous, which only illustrates a very important point — given enough time, deer will eat almost anything.”

And that has pretty much been our experience.

Gretchen recently bought a cranesbill plant, a perennial said to be deer resistant and attractive to butterflies with its brilliant red flowers. She left it sitting next to the house until she could get around to planting it in her flower garden. Something made a meal on it during the night. I suspect the deer.

Gretchen forgives the deer for feasting on her daylilies on the south-facing slope. They’re among the first green vegetation in spring, and the deer seemed to need that this year after a hard winter. But the rhubarb and other edible vegetables are another story. So we’ve added another fenced garden to our yard this spring.

We were hauling a 50-foot roll of six-foot woven wire fencing and a dozen metal fence posts to the car recently.

“That won’t keep the deer out,” a voice said from behind me.

I turned, expecting the speaker to give an explanation. But he walked on by without another word.

I wanted to defend my purchase and tell him that the five-foot-high woven wire fence that we put up last year had been effective in protecting a small garden plot behind the house. And row covers over our raised beds protect the lettuces and swiss chard.

So from now on we will just assume that there’s no such thing as a plant that a deer won’t eat. We know they love hostas, burning bush, white pine and ivy, cone flowers and tulips. We’re just waiting for them to prove us wrong on daffodils which, so far at least, have been unmolested (don’t get us started on moles).

One garden advisor suggested that if you wanted to make your fencing more attractive you could let vining plants climb it.

We planted ivy to climb on a trellis. Now we have it covered with deer netting after learning how much they enjoyed the ivy.

We wanted to live in the woods and the deer are just as much a part of the landscape as oak, birch and aspen. So we just mourn our losses and make more fences. Good fences make good neighbors, right?