Browse by plant type

Perennials do the heavy lifting in a garden where deer live. They come back every year, so a plant that survives its first winter of browsing will keep paying off. The mint family dominates this list for a reason: aromatic oils are a defence deer never learned to get past.

Shrubs are the most expensive deer mistake available. A browsed perennial regrows in spring, but a shrub eaten back to bare wood often never recovers its shape. Getting this layer right matters more than any other planting decision.

Young trees face two separate problems: browsing on the foliage, and buck rub on the trunk in autumn. Rub damage kills trees that browsing would only disfigure, and no repellent prevents it. Trunk guards do.

Annuals are where you get colour that the resistant perennial palette struggles to provide, particularly reds and hot pinks. The trade-off is that you replant every year, so a bad choice costs you a season rather than a decade.

Ornamental grasses are close to a free win. Deer almost universally ignore them, they hold structure through winter when everything else has collapsed, and they need cutting back once a year and nothing else.

Bulbs give you the clearest substitution in the whole of deer gardening. Tulips get destroyed. Daffodils, alliums and fritillaria contain compounds that deer and rodents both refuse. Swap one for the other and the problem simply goes away.

Groundcover sits at browsing height and stays there all year, so resistance matters more here than the low profile suggests. Several of the reliable options spread aggressively, which is worth knowing before you plant a hundred of them.

Ferns solve the hardest problem in deer gardening. Shade plus deer rules out most of the palette, and the obvious shade plant, the hosta, is the most browsed thing in North American gardens. Ferns are reliably ignored and thrive exactly where hostas fail you.

Vines get browsed at the bottom and left alone higher up, so an established vine usually survives while a newly planted one does not. Protect the first two seasons and the problem tends to solve itself.

Biennials grow leaves in their first year, flower and set seed in the second, then die. Most of the good ones self-sow freely enough that you only plant them once, which makes deer damage in year one more costly than it looks: lose the rosette and you lose the following summer as well.