Is Perennial Salvia deer resistant?

Mint family, aromatic, and reliably left alone. It is the workhorse of a deer-resistant bed because it flowers for months rather than weeks.

The key to that long season is cutting it back hard after the first flush fades, right down to the low basal foliage rather than just snipping the spent spikes. It looks brutal for a fortnight and then reblooms properly. Deadheading lightly gives a thin second showing; shearing gives a real one.

It wants sun and drainage and nothing else. In damp or shaded ground it opens out from the middle and flops onto its neighbors, which is usually diagnosed as needing staking when it actually needs a drier, sunnier spot.

Do deer eat salvia?

Seldom. Rutgers rates perennial salvia Seldom Severely Damaged, and NC State's entry for Salvia nemorosa says it "is seldom damaged by deer or rabbit browsing," listing deer, rabbits, drought, dry soil and pollution among the challenges it resists. The mint-family scent above is the mechanism, and it is the same one that puts lavender and Russian sage at the top of the list. Under heavy pressure a flower spike is occasionally bitten off; the plant is not.

Protecting salvia

Rarely needed, and the one thing that helps is the thing the plant wants anyway: sun and drainage. A salvia in damp shade opens out and flops, as above, and soft, sprawling growth is the version of any plant deer take first. Where spikes are going in a bad spring, one application of the 20 percent egg spray Colorado State rates High covers the thirty days until the first flush is over.

What browsing does to it

The same thing the shears do. NC State: "once the plant has bloomed and the stem has turned brown, cut it down to the basal leaves and new flowers will appear," and a spike browsed in June is a spike cut early. The hard cut-back above is how the June-to-September bloom NC State describes is kept going, on a plant of 18 inches to 3 feet, hardy in zones 4 to 8.