How to Keep Animals from Eating Your Tender New Plants
Five ways to protect your garden from persistent animal pests.
Plants that Deer Like Best
Deer have the reputation of being garden invaders that eat any plant if they’re hungry enough.
While that’s mostly true when the food supply is low and the deer population is high, deer are actually selective feeders under normal conditions.
Like so many mammals and even bugs, deer have food favorites.
Researchers at the Penn State Deer Research Center verified that in a study in which they set out 15 kinds of plants in containers, then watched via cameras how eight mature does browsed them over three seasons.
The deer clearly loved Oriental bittersweet, privet, Morrow’s honeysuckle, and native red maple, but they avoided Japanese barberry, hay-scented fern, and two common weeds – garlic mustard and Japanese stiltgrass.
Observations and studies like that have led to a variety of "deer-resistant plant lists" that rate different plant species by their deer appeal.
A deer’s food preference can expand to almost any plant in winter when the supply is limited. Photo by George Weigel
Avoidance strategy
What’s harder to find are lists of plants that deer like best.
Those are helpful because they zero in on plants that gardeners in deer-overrun areas should cross off their list first.
However, given the number of new gardeners and the many more in which plant homework is off their radar, deer-favorite plants are often planted. Predictably (at least for those who know deer tastes), these plants are quickly chewed to the ground, wasting effort and money and feeding the viewpoint “Why bother?”
Avoiding deer-favorite plants doesn’t completely solve the problem because hungry deer tend to go down the list until they find something they do like. If you avoid their top 100 favorite plants, they’ll eat No. 101 that you did plant.
But the upside is that the lower you dive on the list, the better chance deer will fill up on tastier fare elsewhere.
That could be in nearby woods, or it could be in neighboring yards inadvertently filled with top-of-the-menu choices.
It’s like the old saying… you don’t have to outrun a charging bear, you just have to outrun the other people with you.
Deer have clear food preferences in normal times. Hosta is arguably their No. 1 menu choice. Photo by George Weigel
10 landscape-plant deer favorites
With that in mind, here are 10 common landscape choices that deer usually will eat first – along with alternatives lower on the menu:
- Hosta. This leafy perennial is a deer’s No. 1 salad ingredient. Coralbells, ligularia, brunnera, and bergenia are four alternate shade-tolerant, wide-leafed, deer-resistant perennials.
- Daylily. Deer especially love the flowers and flower buds, but they’ll eat daylily foliage, too. Black-eyed susans, coreopsis, and crocosmia are three sun-loving, bright-colored perennial alternatives.
- Yew. Japanese plum yews look almost identical to common, soft-needled English yews and their hybrids, but deer have little interest in them. Junipers, dwarf cryptomeria, and boxwoods are three evergreen alternatives.
- American arborvitae. Although western arborvitae (Thuja plicata) look the same to us as the widely planted, tall, evergreen eastern arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis), they’re markedly different in deer appeal.
- Evergreen azalea. Young azaleas are especially appealing to deer. Shade-tolerant, broadleaf evergreen alternatives include leucothoe, boxwoods, and box honeysuckle.
- Rhododendron. Pieris (Japanese andromeda) is the closest shade-tolerant, blooming evergreen alternative to tasty rhododendrons. Aucuba is a shade-tolerant evergreen that delivers color from its golden or variegated leaves. Shade-tolerant, non-evergreen alternative shrubs include red-twig dogwood, spicebush, winterberry holly, and beautyberry.
- Roses. You wouldn’t think deer would eat anything with jaggy thorns, but they do… usually in winter. Compact, sun-loving, flowering alternative shrubs that deer seldom touch include dwarf weigela, dwarf chokeberry, spirea, deutzia, abelia, caryopteris, and Virginia sweetspire.
- Wintercreeper euonymus. Deer often eat this evergreen groundcover in winter as well. Allegheny spurge and sweetbox are good evergreen alternatives for shade. Creeping sedum and spreading junipers are good evergreen alternatives for sun.
- Tulip. Good luck getting a bud to open before deer browse every last one. Repellents are a must if you’re dead set on these bulbous beauties, but a better strategy is to just switch to daffodils, alliums, and/or summer snowflakes
- Cherry trees. The fruits and leaves of cherry trees are very tasty to deer (crabapples are a close second). Small flowering trees that deer usually don’t bother include Kousa dogwood, red buckeye, crape myrtle, Japanese tree lilac, smoke trees, and sweetbay magnolia.
This is what deer can do to a stand of eastern arborvitae – some of their favorite plants. Photo by George Weigel
Five more deer-feeding thoughts…
- Deer eat different things at different times, i.e. in winter vs. summer when plant availability differs widely.
- Not all deer have the same preferences. A male in breeding mode may go after different plants than a female who’s pregnant or lactating.
- Sometimes subtle differences determine what a deer will eat, such as how your particular soil nutrients have affected a plant’s flavor.
- Most deer don’t like a few general plant characteristics. Two main ones are plants that are hairy or fuzzy (lamb’s ear, rose campion, salvia) and plants that have strong scents (lavender, rosemary, butterfly bush, catmint).
- Never get too cocky. It’s entirely possible for plants you’ve been "safely" growing for years to suddenly become deer dessert when the right hungry deer comes along.
