Deer resistant garden
I live in a quiet neighborhood with nice neighbors and some rather obnoxious ones: four-legged ones. Deer are regular uninvited guests in my yard. Over the years, I’ve learned that it is better to just accept their destructive presence and plant more of the types of plants they don’t like in my deer resistant garden.
Plants that I love and that deer hate:
- Raspberry and Coreopsis: My vegetable garden, hit hard by hungry deer, has slowly been replaced with a thriving combination of raspberry bushes and coreopsis (Tickseed) flowers.
- Bleeding Hearts: These beauties greet me every spring. I love them and the local deer population doesn’t.
- Japanese Forestgrass and Ferns: One bed used to hold my beloved hosta collection. After three devastating years of spraying them down with deer repellants only to watch them get devoured anyway, I gave in and switched to Japanese forest grass and ferns instead.
- Boxwoods, Hollies, and Burning Bushes: There are a couple types of bushes that stand up well to deer traffic in my yard. Boxwood, hollies and burning bushes thriving for me.
- Little princess spirea is a royal success in standing up to my local herd of hungry deer.
I love Bleeding Hearts! We have pink and white both. We are right in town, and no deer to worry about. My husband’s school garden is a deer playground though. He has seen them frolicking. He says they tend to leave Alliums alone.
I do love watching them so I figured we had to learn to get along. It is kind of funny that I have more deer at this out with neighbors on all sides than I did when I lived “in the country.” They have adapted well to the suburbs!