I can live with the adorable little deer eating my apple trees. Well, I can tolerate it because there’s not any practical way to protect the orchard, short of a ten-foot-high electric fence (not practical) — but when it comes to the flower garden, the deer had better keep off!
My pride and joy (and the result of a heck of a lot of digging and weeding) is a 40-foot mixed perennial garden bed. The deer seem to feel that this lovely garden is a buffet table, laid out for their browsing pleasure.
Asiatic lilies don’t stand a chance. Every year I get all excited to see my gorgeous exotic lilies budding up, and then comes a night when the deer tiptoe in and work their systematic way down the length of the border, eating off the top half of every single lily.
This year, even the delphineum plants have been thoroughly browsed, and the heuchera, and the lavatera. The deer have even been eating my daylilies, and I just gave up on growing hosta plants some years ago… It wouldn’t surprise me to go out some morning and find the prickly Scottish thistles eaten down to the ground.
It would break a gardener’s heart.
You know those lists of garden plants that are supposed to be “deer resistant”?
Don’t believe a word of it!
If there are enough deer in an area, they’ll start to eat almost any plant they find.
Adventures with Deer Repellents
There’s no point in using one of the bad-tasting deer repellent products, because the deer have to actually eat the plant in order to know that it won’t taste good. So you’ve still lost the flowers…
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