How we rate plants
Every number on this site should be checkable. This page says where the ratings come from, what has been verified, and what has not.
Maintained by Ceaser Sinclair. Counts below are queried live, not written by hand.
The deer-resistance rating
Ratings follow the four-tier scale published by Rutgers NJAES in fact sheet E271. 525 of our 594 records carry a rating taken directly from it.
The other 69 are not Rutgers-rated, and the difference matters if you are quoting them. Fifty-four come from the El Paso County CSU Extension list, which publishes a single deer-resistant category rather than a scale — mapped conservatively onto the second tier — and which records mule deer behaviour rather than white-tailed. Ten are food plot forage crops, where heavy browsing is the specification rather than a failure. Five rest on general horticultural consensus. Every plant page names its own source.
Rutgers is used because it is the only large rated list built from sustained field observation rather than compiled from other websites. It measures one thing: how heavily deer damage a plant. It does not measure whether the plant is a good idea.
Which deer, and where
These are white-tailed deer ratings, observed in New Jersey. That is worth stating plainly, because most of this subject is written as though there were one animal called “deer”, and there is not.
White-tailed deer cover most of the country and the ratings travel reasonably well across their range. They travel less well elsewhere. Mule deer through the Rockies and the Great Basin browse differently and will take plants a whitetail in New Jersey walked past. Columbian and Sitka black-tailed deer on the Pacific coast and in southeast Alaska are different again. Axis deer in Hawaii, and in parts of the Texas Hill Country, are not a North American animal at all, are largely unmanaged where they occur, and browse plants no mainland list has ever tested.
So the further you are from the eastern whitetail range, the more a rating here is a starting point rather than an answer. State pages say which animal you are actually dealing with. What survives in gardens near you remains better evidence than any national list, including this one.
Where we disagree with Rutgers
A plant can be rated Rarely Damaged and still be a bad plant. Japanese barberry is a good example: deer genuinely avoid it, and it is banned or restricted across much of the northeast. Nineteen records carry an invasive listing, and eleven of those sit in the top two deer-resistance tiers.
Where that conflict exists, the plant’s page says so and the homepage lists them outright. Deer leaving a plant alone is not a reason to plant it.
Hardiness zones
Zones are cross-checked against the NC State Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, one record at a time, against the zone system published by the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. 357 of 594 have been through that.
The check was worth running. Of 338 species-level records compared, 130 disagreed with NC State, and 37 of those claimed more cold-hardiness than the plant actually has, which is the direction that kills a shrub. All were corrected.
Why 121 records cannot be verified this way
Some entries are listed at genus level, as Sedum sp. or Malus sp. rather than a single species. Rutgers rates at that level in many cases and it is a reasonable unit for deer palatability, because the whole genus tends to behave alike.
It is not a reasonable unit for a hardiness zone. A genus can span zone 3 to zone 11, so there is no single correct answer to verify against, and NC State has no page for a genus. Zone ranges on those records are indicative of the commonly grown species and are labelled as such rather than counted as verified. Treating them as checked would be the more flattering number and the less honest one.
What is still unchecked
116 records are species-level and have not yet been through a second source, mostly because NC State has no entry for them. Those need a different reference and have not had one yet.
Photographs
Every photograph is Creative Commons or public domain, with the photographer and licence credited in the caption on the plant’s page. Attribution is a condition of the licence, not a courtesy, so it renders in the figure rather than in a colophon.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it is worth telling us, and it will be changed rather than defended. Every plant page carries the date it was last reviewed.
Corrections go to hello@mydeergarden.com, and who maintains this is a real page rather than a byline.
Where this shows up
The methodology is only worth reading because it changes what the rest of the site says. The places it shows most:
- Sources, the full list of what is cited and what each one is used for.
- Deer-resistant shrubs, where four of the nine invasive-flagged records sit in the top tier, which is the clearest case of the scale measuring one thing and not another.
- Plants by state and zone, where the state pages name which deer species you are actually dealing with.
- The full encyclopedia, filterable by rating, zone, light and native range.
- Terms and disclaimer, including what this site commits to never doing.