Is Garden Mum (Mums, Chrysanthemum) deer resistant?

Bitter foliage, and deer generally walk past it in summer. Fall is different: the flower buds get browsed just as they color up, which is exactly when you bought the plant for.

The bigger issue is that most mums sold in September are not going to survive. Florist mums are grown as disposable color, forced into bud, with almost no root system and no time to establish before frost. They are annuals in practice whatever the label says.

Hardy garden mums are a different plant, sold in spring, planted early enough to root properly, and pinched back through June to build a dense mound. Those come back. If you want perennial mums, buy them in the growing season rather than as fall decoration.

Do deer eat mums?

The buds, more than the leaves. Rutgers rates garden mums Occasionally Severely Damaged; NC State's entry for Chrysanthemum morifolium lists deer among the challenges the plant resists. Both are right about a plant whose foliage is bitter and whose fall buds are not. Through summer the leaves are mostly left alone. From September the color-up is the signal, and a pot of mums on a porch step in deer country is often headless by the second week.

Protecting mums in fall

Spray at color-up, not after: the 20 percent egg mix Colorado State rates High, repeated at about thirty days, which covers the whole bloom window of a plant that "does not flower until the autumn." Keep them close to the door rather than at the end of the drive. For plants meant to stay, NC State's schedule is to cut them back three times through spring and summer, the last around mid-August; a mum pinched that late is a dense mound with buds still forming when the deer arrive, and it carries far more of them than a florist plant does.

Do mums grow back after deer eat them?

A hardy garden mum browsed in September regrows from the crown the following spring and is none the worse for it; what is lost is that autumn's flowers. A florist mum bought in bud has no roots to regrow from and was not going to overwinter in any case. So the recovery question is really the purchase question, and the plant to buy is the one sold in May.