You can have your garden and your deer too with this step-by-step guide to coexistence

When deer passed through my habitat this summer, they ate the tops off the brown-eyed Susans. They browsed low branches of walnuts and tips of swamp milkweed. They pruned black raspberries, sumacs, sassafras, shrubby St. John’s worts, common evening primroses, tall phlox, violets, fleabanes, Jerusalem artichokes, elderberries and white wood asters. They munched on pokeweed and jewelweed, wild lettuces and wild strawberry.

And when deer passed through my habitat, here’s what they didn’t eat (at least not this year!): They didn’t eat wild senna, blue mistflower, boneset, common milkweed, mountain mint, wrinkleleaf goldenrod, aromatic asters, or scarlet bee balm. They didn’t bother with Virginia bluebells, golden ragwort, wild ginger, wild bergamot, sneezeweed, false nettle, false sunflowers, penstemons, giant yellow hyssop, purple hyssop, blue vervain, elephant’s foot, ironweed, blue waxseed, yuccas, ostrich ferns, hayscented ferns, royal ferns, cinnamon ferns or any other ferns. They left alone the beautyberries, coralberries, bayberries, hollies, Eastern red cedars, coral honeysuckle and wingstems. If they ate the Virginia creeper vines, I didn’t notice, though I did see a rabbit chowing down on one I’d left as a groundcover in the front garden.

Deer browsed some purpletop grass but gave the purple lovegrass a pass, along with all the other native grasses in our habitat. They nibbled the Eastern woodland sedges in spring but let them be the rest of the season. They taste-tested bits of the cardinal flower in June but snubbed their noses at the regrowth in July, and the stunning red blooms fed hummingbirds and spicebush swallowtail butterflies well into September.

Not a single plant succumbed to herbivory, though the senna buds mysteriously disappeared midsummer. Senna flowers open when plants are four to five feet tall—perfect snacking height—so it would have been easy to blame deer. But this was the work of butterfly babies: dozens of cloudless sulphur caterpillars who specialize on senna blooms.

Of the plants that were nibbled, none but the blue wood asters were eaten to the ground. Even then, I know from experience that not only will they resprout, but next year there will be more of them. That’s how these and many other plants roll—and root. Browsing often triggers spreading, all the better to increase chances of survival next season.

It was a season of abundance in the garden, a beautiful counterbalance—and some days the only saving grace—to brutal losses in the world at large. Not only did we coexist with every creature in our habitat, from the young buck who started relaxing in our presence to the sand-loving wasps nesting by our patio, but we gained more unexpected treasures: volunteers like smooth witchgrass, fall panicgrass, hairy beadgrass, sweet everlasting, and deertongue grass, all of which will help feed and shelter even more wild neighbors in years to come.

Bucking Conventional Horticulture Methods

“You can do this because you have such a large space,” a visitor told me during a spring Wild Ones tour of our habitat. “My yard is much smaller, and the deer eat everything.” But the truth is that our peaceful coexistence with deer has nothing to do with size. Our 2.23-acre place is all edge—akin to eight smaller yards surrounded by constantly shifting conditions. Neighbors on every side have expansive lawns bordered by tree lines—excellent hangout spots for deer. But we have what they really want: an extensive food supply and cozy hiding spots. Some deer make their headquarters in our sanctuary, where fawns hide safely among the ferns and bucks and does can sleep under the shrubs.

A wildlife garden should attract and nurture these mammals, but keeping it sustainable requires trading conventional landscaping practices for more holistic ones. Evenly spaced plants surrounded by mulch doesn’t build resilience, but growing plants from seed, encouraging volunteers from the seedbank, and dense and diverse plantings do.

You can have your garden and your deer too by following these 10 steps:

1. Give nature time to catch up.

Laments about deer presence don’t account for what’s absent—natural forests, grasslands, and connecting corridors. When converting nothing to something, it’s easy to fall into the trap of magnifying short-term losses of nibbled plants without considering long-term gains. What native seeds are deer bringing into our habitats? How do their hoofprints and wallowing spots help sculpt the land? Natural disturbances bring new life, but only if we let them unfold.

Our lives are shorter than those of many trees and ecological communities, and patience is not one of our virtues as a species. Yet most of us are at least as displaced as deer and don’t even realize it. Even though lawns were not part of our species’ natural history for the first 200,000 years, we treat it as a baseline. Pampered plants packaged in pots for sale are also a recent phenomenon, and those plants have little means of defending themselves when plunked down on open land without their traditional floral communities.

Tender new growth and high water content increase a plant’s appeal to deer, notes pioneering landscape designer Larry Weaner, founder of New Directions in the American Landscape. “And if you fertilize or if the plant just came out of a nursery where they were fertilizing it frequently to grow it fast so they could sell it fast,” he says, “you’ve got a lot more growth than you would if that plant was just in the ground in the wild.” Manage your own expectations, remembering that wildlife gardens are not insta-gardens; you are in it for the long haul.

2. Welcome plant resilience.

Plants aren’t helpless bystanders. Being rooted in place has led to remarkable self-defenses against herbivores of all kinds. At the first sign of nibbling, plants can release chemical alarms that draw predatory insects or alert neighbors to pending attack. They can amp up defensive chemicals to decrease palatability. They can invest more energy into root systems, sprout more flower buds, thicken leaves or grow more thorns.

Plants also have a keen awareness of which animals are helping themselves to a bite. Scientists around the world have measured their resilient responses: In Botswana, goat saliva caused the clipped shoots of red bushwillow trees to grow three times as long as branches clipped only by pruners, and the plants doubled leaf production. In Sweden, moose saliva stimulated significantly more branching in willow saplings. In Germany, deer saliva increased hormone production in beech saplings and defense compounds in maple saplings.

Even many of the tastiest plants bounce back from browsing. An aster nibbled early in the season might simply bloom a bit later, and more lushly. A swamp sunflower that loses its head to browsing might sprout several more buds. Young transplants that seem to dwindle following a snacking fest may rebound in successive years, given enough time to put down roots.

3. Create communities: nurture “associational resistance.”

Context is everything. Whether a plant is tasty today might depend on what’s growing next to it—or what’s growing (or not growing) next door. A row of 100 tulips plunked down in a sea of turfgrass leaves little choice for a large hungry mammal. But a mixture of preferred and less tasty native species encourages deer to move along in the same way that humans navigate buffet lines, picking and choosing a few nibbles here and there but not sampling all 50 dishes at once.

There’s no such thing as deer-proof species; animal preferences and plant palatability depend on season, food availability, soil nutrients and other variables. But chemical and structural traits—like toxins and thorns—make some plants reliably less interesting to mammals. Natural communities capitalize on these resilient features through “associational resistance” or “associational defense,” whereby more vulnerable plants mingle densely with better defended ones. There’s a reason that old-field meadows pop with colorful wildflowers even when deer numbers are high, says Os Schmitz, Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology at Yale University: they’re not monocultures.

Schmitz has seen tasty clonal species like goldenrod send suckers far away into other patches to spread their genes and minimize the risk that they’ll be wiped out in one dining session. “It’s about creating a neighborhood, a variety, so that any one herbivore won’t necessarily look at all of the plants as really highly valuable or palatable,” Schmitz told me when I was writing my book Wildscape. “It’s not like a rabbit going in a carrot field and saying, ‘I’m just going to mow everything down.’ You have to actually spend a lot of time finding that food item that is the most palatable to you. And that’s why you get persistence of the vegetation and not overgrazing.”

4. Enlist plant protectors: grasses, ferns, sedges, mints, milkweeds and more.

In meadows grown from seed, more than half a dozen plants might grow in a space as small as a square foot, says Weaner. When bluestems and other native grasses are intermingled, tastier plants like phlox and asters are less appealing, he notes, because “they’ve got to get a mouthful of grass to get to the seedling too.”

Protective relationships: Click any photo above to see the full image and caption.

Weaner first noticed the protective effect of grasses in a seeded meadow where most plants topped out at three feet and any stray stems extending above the mixture had been nibbled. The revelation led to a strategy he recommends often: planting vulnerable plants in the same hole with protective grasses, sedges and ferns. For example, “If you’re going to plant a woodland ground layer, plant sedges that deer won’t eat and plant white wood aster that they do,” he says. “And the sedges will protect the aster—but not if you plant them in a separate spot.”

Less palatable wildflowers can also form a barrier around tastier ones. Species in the mint family—especially mountain mints and wild basil but also bee balm, wild bergamot and lyreleaf sage—are carefree spreaders with high pollinator value and little appeal to mammals due to their chemical makeup. Plants like late boneset and blue mistflower usually go untouched because they contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids, compounds that can be hepatotoxic, or liver-damaging to mammals. In our garden, wingstem is also rarely if ever eaten.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

5. Bring on the thorny and sticky plants.

Just as plants acquire defense by association when growing near chemically fortified neighbors, they can also rely on the structural safeguards of thickets and thorns to avoid being eaten. Redbuds and oaks routinely grow unnoticed here under the canes of black raspberries, and wildflowers pop up in the company of Allegheny blackberries.

It’s a phenomenon seen in natural plant communities around the world. In Kenya, scientists found that understory savanna seedlings had a much higher sprouting and survival rate when growing under the protective cover of thorny acacia trees. In England, a fallow field became forest in a matter of decades after squirrels, jays and mice planted acorns under the shelter of blackberries, hawthorns and blackthorns.

Other structural defenses include resinous and sticky coatings. On my visits to the southwestern United States, I often admire baby saguaro cacti growing within the dense cover of sticky, unpalatable triangle-leaf bursage. A critical nurse plant in the Ambrosia genus, triangle-leaf bursage provides shade, adds nitrogen to the soil, and offers refuge from mule deer, bighorn sheep and jackrabbits who munch on young cacti to get water.

In my own habitat, the star sticky species is blue waxseed, a native annual beloved by sulphur butterflies in my garden but snubbed by deer.

6. Rethink “weeds,” encouraging native volunteers in your garden.

Many gardeners set themselves up for failure by being too discriminating. Just as they hope to banish deer and other mammals, they also banish pokeweed, blackberries, raspberries, fleabane, sumacs, common evening primroses, violets, burnweed, horseweed, clearweed, goldenrods, wood sorrel and other native species that tend to volunteer in disturbed soils. That’s counterproductive, as these pioneer plants can help us coexist with deer by either 1) providing more “free” food for them to eat; or 2) serving as buffers that protect tastier plants.

Pokeweed, for example, offers lots of good snacks to deer as they meander along our pathways. It’s such a favored plant that hunters recommend it in deer plots. Other wildlife, including birds, opossums, foxes, hummingbirds and caterpillars are also fans of pokeweed. Many people remove it, fearing it will “take over” a garden, but that’s much more likely to happen in bare, constantly disturbed areas such as conventional vegetable gardens. In a space that’s filled with other native plants and inhabited by deer, pokeweed has natural limits on its growth.

Burnweed, on the other hand, is less appealing to deer but can serve as a protector plant, its lush growth shielding neighbors nearby. Wasps, bees and other pollinators visit the tiny flowers while the leaves and tall stems block the view of more tender plants or obscure access to them. This season, burnweed helped me grow woodland sunflowers for the first time in many years. Though buds were nipped repeatedly in spring and early summer, my new transplants are finally blooming in the burnweed’s embrace.

7. Create spatial buffets and buffers.

If deer are routine visitors, watch how they move through your space. Where do they lie down to rest? What pathways do they follow? What time of day do they browse? Like us, deer are creatures of habit, and they’re also opportunists, sampling the menu along the way. You can plan for this through mixed plantings at edges of paths and gentle navigational cues.

Whenever I find native volunteers in places where they’ll likely need to be removed—cracks in the driveway or sidewalk, mulched trails and walkways—I consider it an opportunity to create both buffets and buffers along the paths that deer and rabbits most frequent. Transplanting common evening primrose seedlings to the front of a garden might seem like a silly move, given how tall they can grow, but I know they’re irresistible to herbivores who will help me prune them—a natural version of the popular “Chelsea chop” method of moderating plant growth. Mixing in other, less palatable volunteers, such as blue mistflower or three-seeded mercury, fills the edges along deer trails with plants that can hold the ground.

8. Nurture habitat-enriching dead-wood barriers.

When placed strategically along paths and around vulnerable plants, logs, branches and twigs can create visual and tactile barriers to deer herbivory. At the same time, these natural blockades provide valuable habitat for woodpeckers and insects, including beetles and cavity-nesting bees. Throughout our garden, we use small logs and branches to line pathways that direct both humans and wildlife. We also prop them up against stakes and outside tree cages, making it harder for deer to walk through a given spot while the understory is still getting established.

Neighbors who cut down trees have donated wood to us, and we place pieces of tree trunks at corners of beds and in front of new plantings. When branches fall from maples and redbuds, their curved and twisted tips make perfect temporary natural “cages” for seedlings and transplants. For shrubs, you can create a more intentional dead-wood barrier by piling branches and brush between stakes.

Where possible, leave dead wood standing, including spent flower stalks and grasses, to enrich habitat for bees and birds while also creating natural deterrents around tender plants.

9. Use caging temporarily and creatively.

I never wanted to have a lot of cages because my goal is to welcome, not exclude; this place is intended to be a sanctuary, after all, not a plant zoo. But when planting in a large, open expanse mostly stripped of its natural diversity and structure, DIY welded wire cages can help trees and shrubs survive the establishment phase. This is especially true if you’re planting on a budget and adding only a few bareroot woodies at a time.

Over the past few years I’ve also begun adding plugs of wildflowers, sedges and grasses inside tree and shrub cages. This meets several goals: suppressing the spread of species that are not helpful to wildlife, creating a habitat-rich ground layer from the get-go, and—especially pertinent to the topic at hand—helping more vulnerable herbaceous species grow enough to set seed and eventually spread outside the cages.

It’s important to use welded wire grids that are either so small (like hardware cloth) or so large they aren’t likely to entangle snakes, birds or small mammals trying to pass through.

Many people add cages and tree protectors to prevent deer from rubbing their antlers on young trees, but Weaner has developed a simpler and less obtrusive method: place pieces of rebar against the trunk during rutting season. “If you just take three of them and sledgehammer them into the ground right up against the trunk on three sides, the deer cannot get to the trunk—there’s not enough space in between,” he says. “And the advantage of rebar is it turns a rust color. It really fades into the landscape.”

10. Be present and thoughtful.

Plants know how to grow. They’ve been doing it in the presence of herbivores for millions of years longer than humans have existed. In our short lifespans, none of us could even possibly get to know more than a smidgeon about the ecological relationships all around us. So why not start from a position of curiosity, rather than projecting our assumptions and leaping to conclusions about our wild neighbors?

Question what you read on social media and what you hear from gardening friends. Watch what unfolds in your own space. Remember that habitat creation is not a cookie-cutter affair. We don’t need all the things all the time. If mountain mints and spicebush grow prolifically in your garden, start there and don’t try to force the cardinal flowers or other plants that haven’t yet found their footing. Know that more is going on right in front of you than you could ever imagine, most of it invisible to you. In Wildscape, I wrote about a plant relationship that’s so hidden but so effective it vastly expanded my view of what’s possible:

Plants with lower chemical defenses can even physically borrow those of neighboring species. In the boreal forests of Finland and in controlled experiments, researchers found that “sticky” semivolatile compounds emitted from rhododendrons land on birch trees. Seedlings and leaves coated with these protective natural repellents hold on to their armor for hours and are less attractive to insect herbivores. This type of association, the authors noted, could “help plants protect themselves as a result of coexistence.”

If the plants can work together to create resilient forests and grasslands—the only homes they’ll ever know—then surely we can learn to share resources with the other inhabitants of our spaces too, replacing resistance to our wild neighbors with a more peaceful coexistence.

[All photos (except elderberry) by Nancy Lawson/HumaneGardener.com]

Related Articles and Resources

To read a few of the scientific papers I consulted for Wildscape and previous articles I’ve written on this subject, check out the embedded links above. Also see Os Schmitz’s book The New Ecology: Rethinking a Science for the Anthropocene and Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher’s Garden Revolution: How our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change.

I keep an ongoing list of plants deer prefer and those they tend to avoid. I welcome suggestions but recommend avoiding treating any list as gospel or viewing it as entirely applicable to your own habitat. But perhaps this document will give you a good start on making your own list too: Gardening Among Hungry Mammals.