Ceaser Sinclair

I write and maintain My Deer Garden. Every deer-resistance rating here starts from the Rutgers NJAES four-tier scale, which remains the only large rated list built from sustained field observation rather than from other websites.

Growing data is compiled from state extension services and cross-checked record by record against a second source, and the methodology page says exactly how many have been through that and how many have not. Where the sources disagree with each other, or where a plant deer ignore turns out to be invasive, the plant’s own page says so rather than quietly picking a side.

What is here

594 plants rated for deer damage, 32 guides on fencing, repellents, damage identification and garden design, and a growing section on planting to attract deer rather than repel them.

The database is the point. Most deer-resistant plant lists online are copies of each other, and several copy errors that have been circulating for a decade. This one starts from a named source, records where that source stops being reliable, and says how much of it has been checked.

How to read a rating

No plant is deer-proof. The four tiers describe how heavily deer damage a plant under observation, not whether they will ever touch it, and local pressure moves every one of them. If a plant rated Rarely Damaged is being eaten in your garden, your pressure is higher than the rating assumed and the sensible move is to shift your whole plan one tier more conservative.

Which deer these ratings describe

White-tailed deer, observed in New Jersey. That is worth saying plainly, because most of this subject is written as though there were one animal called “deer”. Across the whitetail range the ratings travel reasonably well. Mule deer through the Rockies browse differently, black-tailed deer on the Pacific coast are different again, and the axis deer in Hawaii and parts of the Texas Hill Country are not a North American animal at all.

So the further west you garden, the more a rating here is a starting point rather than an answer. State pages name the animal you are actually dealing with, and 54 western species now carry ratings from a Colorado extension source rather than from Rutgers, labelled as such on every record.

What this site will not do

No review stars or rating schema on products nobody here has used. Google’s reviews guidance asks for evidence of first-hand testing, and inventing it would undo the only thing this site is trying to be. No display advertising. And no recommendation because it pays better: where a cheaper or free option works as well, the page says so. Those commitments are written down on the terms page.

There is also a standing refusal to launder a rating. A plant rated Rarely Damaged can still be a bad plant, and several of the most reliably ignored shrubs are invasive across much of the country. Those carry a warning here rather than a recommendation, which is a disagreement with the source rather than a summary of it.

Corrections

Gardening advice online is confidently wrong more often than it is uncertain. If something here is wrong, it gets corrected rather than defended, and the methodology page keeps a live count of what has been verified and what has not. Plant data on this site has been wrong before and was fixed: a hardiness-zone audit against NC State found a 38% error rate and every record was corrected.

Corrections go to hello@mydeergarden.com. If you garden somewhere and the deer do not behave the way a rating here says, that is genuinely useful and worth sending.