Is Foxglove deer resistant?

Cardiac glycosides make every part of it toxic, and deer avoid it completely. So do rabbits.

The same chemistry means it is dangerous to people and pets. The leaves have been mistaken for comfrey by foragers with fatal results, and it should not go where small children graze a bed.

The thing most gardeners get wrong is the life cycle. Common foxglove is a biennial: it makes a flat rosette of leaves the first year, flowers spectacularly the second, then dies. A planting that appears to be thriving perennially is actually reseeding itself, and the way to keep it going is to let some spikes set seed rather than deadheading everything tidily.

It wants part shade and moisture, and sulks in dry sun.

Do deer eat foxglove?

Rarely. Rutgers rates common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, Rarely Damaged, A, and NC State says why in a fragment: "contains a chemical that deer avoid," with rabbits on the same resistance list. The chemical is cardiac glycosides, which NC State rates a High-severity poison, and foxglove is one of the plants where the chemistry and the deer agree; rhododendron and yew are the ones where they do not.

Where it grows

NC State: zones 4a to 9b, 2 to 5 feet, full sun or partial shade, flowering spring into summer, a biennial that makes a rosette the first year and a spike the second. The ASPCA lists foxglove as toxic to cats, dogs and horses; NC State's symptom list runs from nausea to "cardiac arrhythmias, death," every part poisonous, and the callout below carries it. It belongs where children and dogs do not graze a bed.

Protecting foxglove

Nothing from deer. Letting a few spikes seed is what keeps a planting going, since each plant dies after flowering.

If it is browsed

It is not, in the ordinary run. A rosette that vanishes over winter has rotted in wet ground or been taken by slugs, and a spike that fails to appear in the second spring was a first-year plant last year.