"Take Clausen's tips, and you just might convince the deer to eat at a restaurant down the street." -Good House Keeping
Are deer destroying your garden? There is a solution, and it doesn't involve fencing, barriers, or chemicals. Keeping your garden safe from deer is as simple as choosing the right plants. In 50 Beautiful Deer-Resistant Plants, perennial plant expert Ruth Rogers Clausen highlights the best, most versatile plants that deer simply don't eat. The plant choices include annuals and perennials, shrubs, bulbs, grasses, and herbs. For each suggested plant, Clausen shares helpful growing and design tips. This practical, authoritative, full-color guide is a must-have solution to a common garden problem.
Offering a wonderful array of potential plant combinations with other deer-resistant varieties, Clausen shows readers how to create a gorgeous garden and still keep deer at bay. Ruth Rogers Clausen is the author of 50 Beautiful Deer-Resistant Plants, and co-author of Essential Perennials and The Proven Winners Garden Book. She received a Quill and Trowel award from the Garden Writers Association (now Garden Communicators International) and has written for the American Garden Guides series. She is the former horticulture editor for Country Living Garden magazine and a long-time contributor to Country Gardens magazine. Ruth lectures widely at horticultural conventions and symposia, flower shows, and to garden societies and clubs. In 2017, she was awarded the Garden Media Award by the Perennial Plant Association.
Alan L. Detrick is a professional photographer whose images of nature and gardens appear in media worldwide. He has lectured and conducted photography workshops at Maine Media Workshops, The New York Botanical Garden, Chanticleer Garden, Brookside Gardens, and Longwood Gardens, as well as for the the American Horticultural Society, the Garden Club of America, and the Garden Writers Association, where he was elected into the Hall of Fame in 2010. He is the author of Macro Photography for Gardeners and Nature Lovers. Introduction
Considering the explosion of deer populations across the United States and the huge amount of damage that they inflict on rural, suburban, and even urban gardens and parks, it is no surprise that deer and gardeners are seldom compatible. But is it possible to achieve a beautiful, deer-resistant garden without resorting to fences, barriers, and toxic repellents? Indeed, you can still have a lush, thriving garden by making smart plant choices. Many stunning plants are unpalatable to deer because of their poisonous compounds, fuzzy or aromatic leaves, tough, spiny, or bristly textures, and for a variety of other less obvious reasons. This guide presents the most outstanding ornamental examples of these.
The "Bambi" syndrome is fine for those not plagued by deer. Of course deer are beautiful, and yes, they were sometimes (not always) here first, and they certainly deserve to live out their lives with full bellies as nature intended, but there is often not enough food for dense deer populations, and these animals are stressed by modern life and eradication of habitat. Since natural predators such as mountain lions and wolves have been largely eliminated, deer have been allowed to run out of control. A hundred years ago when year-round hunting was permitted, white-tailed deer numbers dropped, so hunters, fearing their sport would be ruined, urged laws to restrict hunting to about three to four months, from fall through Christmas. As the balance of nature was disrupted, white-tailed deer populations exploded.
Gardeners in different parts of the country are plagued by different species of deer. West of the Mississippi River, mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and black-tailed deer (O. hemionus columbianus) predominate. The latter is a subspecies of the former, smaller and stockier but just as hungry. In the East and elsewhere, white-tail
