Neither my husband nor I had lived in a house, let alone a house with a yard, since we had fled our parents’ homes after high school. Let’s just say we faced quite a learning curve.

Having a pool means that, by law, a childproof barrier must surround it. The previous owner had enclosed half of the backyard with a cheery-looking six-foot-high picket fence. The pickets were plastic, not wood, but from a distance you couldn’t tell. The other two sides were bordered with waist-high chain-link fencing — functional but ugly. It also completely failed to keep out certain unwelcome visitors.

The hordes of deer that rampage through Suffolk County bound effortlessly over anything shorter than six feet. So too does a local flock of scavenging wild turkeys.

A row of evergreens along the fence includes half a dozen or so arborvitae shaped like Popsicles. We assumed the previous owner, a Swiss gentleman, had trimmed them that way. Perhaps it was a Swiss topiary tradition? No, we learned. Deer had eaten the branches as high as they could reach.

I confess, I yielded early on my no-gardening stance. My wonderful friend Linda had died soon after we moved in. We left her memorial service with crocus bulbs, a gift from her family, which would bloom in April, her birthday month. So I dug a small, half-moon-shaped bed beneath a white birch in the front yard, nestling the crocus bulbs, mixing in some daffodils and covering them all with mulch.

But back to the deer, and the fence. If we were going to grow just about anything, including the once-deer-resistant hydrangeas planted by our Swiss predecessor, now ravaged, we would need a higher one.

“Sure, you can match the picket on this side,” the fence guy said. “But where’s your property line? You might as well fence in whatever’s yours back there.”