Deer-resistant shrubs

What the ratings on this page mean

Every shrub below carries a rating from the Rutgers NJAES scale, which is the standard most extension services use and the only widely published rating built on sustained field observation rather than opinion. It has four tiers: rarely damaged, seldom severely damaged, occasionally severely damaged, and frequently severely damaged.

The encyclopedia holds 134 shrubs. Twenty-nine are rarely damaged and 75 are seldom severely damaged, so 104 of them are shrubs a deer will normally walk past. Twenty-six are occasionally severely damaged. Four are frequently severely damaged, which is the polite way of saying deer eat them.

Nothing on this page is deer proof, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling something. A rating describes what deer did to a plant under observation, in a particular place, under a particular amount of pressure. Your garden is a different experiment.

The four shrubs deer will destroy

There are only four in the frequently severely damaged tier, and between them they account for an enormous amount of wasted money:

• Rhododendron
• Evergreen azalea
• Pinxterbloom azalea
• Japanese yew

If deer visit your garden and you plant any of these unprotected, you are not gardening, you are running a feeding station. Rhododendron and yew in particular are winter browse: they hold leaves when nothing else does, which is exactly when a deer is hungriest and least fussy.

This matters more for shrubs than for anything else you plant. A browsed perennial regrows from the crown in spring and you lose a season. A rhododendron eaten back to bare wood often never recovers its shape at all, because it does not reliably break new growth from old wood. You lose the plant, the ten years it spent getting to that size, and the money.

Toxicity does not predict browsing, and yew proves it

The most common folk theory about deer-resistant planting is that deer avoid toxic plants. It is wrong often enough to be actively misleading, and the clearest counterexample is sitting in the list above.

Japanese yew contains taxine alkaloids. It is genuinely lethal to horses and cattle, in quantities small enough that a few clippings thrown over a fence have killed livestock. Deer browse it heavily anyway and suffer no apparent harm.

The same pattern shows up inside a single plant family. Pieris, mountain laurel and rhododendron are all in the heath family and all carry grayanotoxins. In our own data they land in three different tiers: Japanese pieris and mountain pieris are rarely damaged, mountain laurel is occasionally severely damaged, and rhododendron is frequently severely damaged. If toxicity drove the outcome, those three would not be spread across the whole scale.

Deer are browsers with a rumen and a long evolutionary history of eating things that would make a human very ill. Toxicity is a defence against something else.

What actually keeps deer off a shrub

Three things do most of the work, and they are all detectable by nose or mouth before the animal commits to a bite.

Strong aromatic oils. Bayberry, rosemary, blue mist shrub and fragrant sumac are all in the resistant tiers, and all of them release volatile oils when brushed. A deer relies on smell to find food and to detect predators, and a shrub that floods that channel is a shrub it would rather walk past.

Spines and prickles. Barberry, mahonia and devil's walking stick are armed, and deer feed with their lips. Oregon grape holly and leatherleaf mahonia have holly-like leaves with genuinely sharp margins, and both are rarely damaged.

Texture that is not worth the effort. Boxwood has small, leathery, bitter leaves with a low return per bite. Sweet box and drooping leucothoe are similar. None of these are dramatic defences; they simply make a shrub a poor use of the twenty seconds a deer spends deciding.

Choosing a shrub for hedging and screening

Screening is where most people meet this problem, because a hedge is a large purchase and a browsed hedge looks worse than no hedge.

If year-round cover is the whole point, the evergreen shrubs list narrows this to the 40 that hold their leaves, and it is worth reading with one caution in mind: holding foliage through winter is exactly what makes a shrub valuable to you and valuable to a deer in February. If you want flower instead, flowering shrubs sorts the same list by bloom.

Two notes on that table. Slow-growing evergreens like boxwood are the most expensive way to make a hedge and the most durable once made, so buy the largest plants the budget allows rather than more small ones. And a mixed hedge of three or four of these will survive a bad browsing year far better than a monoculture, because local deer populations develop local habits.

Shrubs for shade, which is where this gets hard

Shade is the constraint that eliminates most of the usual advice, and it is the most common thing people are actually searching for. The problem is structural: a great deal of deer resistance comes from aromatic oils, and the shrubs that produce them heavily are overwhelmingly sun plants adapted to dry, exposed sites. Rosemary, lavender, blue mist shrub and broom all want sun. In a shaded north border, none of them are an option, and the defence they rely on is not available to you.

What works in shade tends to rely on the other two defences instead. Sweet box is the strongest low option: evergreen, rarely damaged, genuinely happy in deep shade under trees, and quietly fragrant in late winter when nothing else is. Drooping leucothoe handles part shade and moist soil, arches attractively over a bank, and is rated rarely damaged. Japanese pieris takes part shade and is the best evergreen structure available in this group. Oregon grape holly and leatherleaf mahonia both tolerate shade and bring the spiny defence with them, which is why they hold up where softer shade plants do not.

The trap in a shaded garden is that the obvious answers are the worst ones. Rhododendron, azalea and mountain laurel are the classic shade shrubs in most of the eastern United States, and three of the four worst-rated shrubs on this entire page come from that group. A shaded woodland edge planted conventionally is close to the ideal deer buffet, which is exactly why so many people arrive at a page like this one after losing a border.

Filter the list below by sun requirement before anything else. The plant has to survive the site before deer resistance means anything, and there is a shade-specific list if that is your whole problem.

The resistant list includes plants you should not plant

This is the part most deer-resistant plant lists leave out, and it is the reason to read a rating alongside something else.

Nine of the 134 shrubs here are flagged as invasive somewhere in the United States. Four of those nine sit in the rarely damaged tier, which is to say that some of the most reliably deer-proof shrubs available are also among the worst things you can put in the ground:

There is no contradiction here once you see what the Rutgers scale measures. It rates palatability to deer. It does not rate ecological impact, and it was never meant to. Japanese barberry is superbly deer resistant and it also forms dense thickets that raise tick populations and displace native understorey. Both things are true.

Deer pressure is part of why several of these spread so successfully in the first place: browsing removes the native competition and leaves the unpalatable invader standing. Planting more of it is not a neutral act.

Check your own state before buying. Lists change yearly and vary by county.

What changes the answer in your garden

A rating is a starting position, not a guarantee. Four things move it.

Winter. Late winter is when resistant plantings get tested, because the easy food is gone. This is when evergreen shrubs get browsed and when a plant that was ignored for three years suddenly is not.

New plantings. A shrub straight from a nursery has been fed, watered and grown soft under irrigation. It is more palatable than the same species that has been in your ground for two years, and the first winter is the risky one. This is the single most common reason someone reports that a deer-resistant shrub was eaten.

Local population. Deer learn regionally. A shrub reliably ignored in one county gets browsed in the next, and there is no substitute for looking at what survives in gardens near you.

Density. Where the herd is large relative to the browse available, the whole scale compresses. Under heavy enough pressure, deer eat boxwood.

If deer have already found a shrub

Damage to an established shrub is worth acting on quickly, because the recovery curve for woody plants is measured in years.

First, confirm it is deer. Deer have no upper incisors, so they tear rather than cut and leave a ragged, stripped stub. A clean cut at 45 degrees is rabbits. Telling the damage apart is worth two minutes before you spend anything.

Then choose the level of protection the plant justifies. A cage of welded wire around one valuable shrub costs very little and works completely. A perimeter is a different order of expense, and what a deer fence costs depends on perimeter length far more than on area. If you go that way, eight feet is the working height and six is the most common expensive mistake.

Repellents work on shrubs better than on most things, because the target is small, fixed and reachable. The egg-based homemade repellent reproduces the active ingredient in the sprays that win university trials, and a shrub is a realistic thing to keep reapplying to.

For young trees and newly planted shrubs, the greater risk is not browsing at all. A buck rubbing his antlers on a two-inch stem in autumn can girdle it and kill it outright in one night.

How to use the list below

The shrubs are grouped by rating, best first. Every entry carries its hardiness range, sun requirement and mature size, and every hardiness range has been checked against the NC State Extension plant toolbox rather than taken on trust.

Start in the rarely damaged group and filter by what your site actually offers. A perfectly deer-proof shrub that wants full sun will not save a shaded north border, and matching the site is what makes the planting survive everything other than deer.