Is Lavender deer resistant?

Aromatic oils deter browsing reliably, and lavender is close to the safest thing you can plant where deer are heavy.

Wet winter soil kills far more lavender than cold ever does. A plant that would survive minus twenty in gravel will rot at minus five in clay. Sharp drainage, full sun, no mulch against the crown, and gravel rather than bark if you mulch at all.

English lavender is the hardy one, reliable to about zone 5. Spanish and French lavenders, the ones with the showy topknot bracts, are zone 8 plants sold widely in the north as though they were not, and they die the first winter.

Prune every year into the green growth, never into bare wood. Lavender does not resprout from old wood, so a plant allowed to go leggy cannot be brought back.

Do deer eat lavender?

Almost never. Rutgers puts Lavandula angustifolia in Rarely Damaged, the top tier, and the mechanism is the oil that makes it lavender: the volatile compounds that fill a room fill a deer's nose, and it moves on. NC State's entry does not mention deer at all, which for a plant this widely grown says as much as a rating would. Rarely is not never. A plant in its first weeks, watered and soft, is the version most likely to be tasted, and a deer in a hard February has been recorded testing plants it ignored all year.

Does lavender keep deer away from other plants?

No trial consulted here says so. The idea that an aromatic plant protects its neighbors is the same claim made for marigolds, and the USDA's twenty-product repellent trial found that scent carried in the air around a plant reduced browsing only when the material could drip onto the foliage itself. A lavender hedge protects lavender. What it does for the roses behind it, nobody has measured.

What kills it instead

Water. NC State: it "does not like wet feet and will die out in heavy clays," and "root rot is caused by overwatering." In deer country lavender's failure is almost always the drainage rather than the deer, and a bed of it black at the crown in April with the deer nowhere in sight is the usual way the plant is lost. Sharp drainage, gravel, no mulch against the crown, as above.