Gardening with Deer and Rabbits
Deer and rabbits. They’re cute, especially when they’re little, and if you don’t have many in your neighborhood, you might be excited to see them visit your garden. If you have a lot of deer or rabbits in your community, you may be less enamored with them… especially if they enjoy dining in your garden and eat every single new plant you try to cultivate. How do we garden for wildlife, if some of the wildlife feast in our gardens like we’re putting out a never-ending buffet?
Gardening for wildlife can include gardening for deer and rabbits, but you won’t get very far if these animals eat your new native plants to the ground. Deer usually eat the tops of plants, and as they feed, they rip and tear plants, leaving ragged cuts on stems. Rabbits clip leaves and shoots off plants and tend to eat most or all of the leaves they can reach. They also eat the softer outer stem of woody plants, which can girdle young trees and shrubs. Deer are messy eaters and can eat plants as high as six feet up. Rabbits are tidier eaters and won’t be able to reach plants higher than three feet.
There is no practical, single strategy for rabbit or deer-proofing your landscaping. Every yard is different, and every deer herd or rabbit warren has its own tastes. The deer and rabbits in your neighborhood definitely aren’t reading the lists we gardeners share of deer-resistant or rabbit-resistant plants! However, there are ways to reduce the damage these herbivores can do to your plants, especially when they’re newly planted or are very small.
At Deeply Rooted Landscapes, we recommend applying multiple strategies. This is more likely to produce a successful native plant garden, even with high deer or rabbit pressure. We recommend using plants that deer and rabbits are less likely to want to eat and protecting those vulnerable, newly planted plants.
Why They Eat Some Plants and Ignore Others
Most plants don’t want their leaves to be eaten, so they’ve evolved to have built-in defenses to make them less palatable to herbivores. Deer and rabbits tend to avoid plants that are fragrant, poisonous, fuzzy, tough, or thorny. For example, many native plants that are strongly scented, like hyssop, bee balm, mountain mint, and wild onions, don’t appeal to them. Neither do milkweeds, which have a bitter milky sap, nor Silphium species with rough, sandpapery leaves.
Forest Keeling Nursery has a helpful acronym to help you remember the types of plants that deer and rabbits are less likely to eat: STOP.
STOP stands for Spiky, Textured, Odorous, and Poisonous
S - Spiky (tough stems, leaves and/or thorns)
Example plants include: Pale Indian Plantain (Arnoglossum atriplicifolium), Pasture Thistle (Cirsium discolor), Rattlesnake Master (Eryngium yuccifolium), Eastern Rose Mallow (Hibiscus laevis), and Eastern Prickly Pear Cactus (Opuntia humifusa).
T - Textured (fuzzy leaves)
Example plants include: Pearly Everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea), Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), Wood Betony (Pedicularis canadensis), Black Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), and Hoary Vervain (Verbena stricta).
O - Odorous (fragrant or pungent plants)
Example plants include: Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), Nodding Onion (Allium cernuum), Hairy Wood Mint (Blephilia hirsuta), Bee Balms (Monarda species), and Mountain Mints (Pycnanthemum species).
P - Poisonous (poisonous or bitter-tasting plants)
Example plants include: Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), Dogbanes (Apocynum species), Milkweeds (Asclepias species), Blue Cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides), and Tall Larkspur (Delphinium exaltatum).
Deer and Rabbit Resistant Plant Lists
We’ve put together a plant list of native species that are generally considered deer and rabbit-resistant for Ohio gardeners. It includes trees, shrubs, perennials, grasses, sedges, ferns, and vines, so you have plenty of options for every layer of your garden.
Deer/Rabbit Resistant Native Plants + Deterring Deer + Rabbits | Deeply Rooted Landscapes
These are some other deer and rabbit-resistant plant lists.
Gardening Among Hungry Mammals | The Humane Gardener
Plants Not Favored by Deer | The Morton Arboretum
Deer & Rabbit Resistant Native Plants | In Our Nature
You can also search for “deer-resistant” or “rabbit-resistant” filters when shopping from native plant nurseries.
When Resistant Plants Still Get Eaten
That being said, no plant is 100 percent safe in every setting. If a deer or a rabbit is hungry and the new garden you just planted is the only food available for them, they will eat your plants, even if it’s not what they prefer to eat. Our homes are in former deer and rabbit habitat; if we live in new suburban neighborhoods, it may be only a few years ago that our backyard was a forest full of food for wildlife like deer and rabbits. Combine this with the fact that lawns and an overabundance of non-native evergreen shrubs like boxwoods are the standard landscaping in most neighborhoods today, and our gardens (native or not) can be an oasis for suburban deer and rabbits living in a food desert. They will eat what they can find, and sometimes it’s the plants we chose because deer and rabbits weren’t supposed to eat them.
One of our clients in Yellow Springs cannot grow Black Eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta), which are supposed to be deer and rabbit-resistant due to their fuzzy leaves. Deer have been observed eating milkweed, which should give them an unpleasant mouthful of sticky sap! A friend gardening in Washington Township has never had Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum) flower in her yard because the deer always eat the flower buds.
Young animals will sample all kinds of plants as they figure out what they like. They’re developing their palate and learning what plants taste good, just like we do. How plants taste and how tough their leaves are change throughout the growing season, so some plants may be vulnerable to deer or rabbit browse only as seedlings and be fine when they’re more mature.
Since these herbivores don’t read our lists of deer and rabbit-resistant plants, it’s important to protect your young plants even if they’re not supposed to be tasty to these mammals.
Protecting Your Plants
There are many different ways to protect your plants from deer and rabbits. Some methods are physical protection, like fencing or cages. Other methods protect by hiding your plants, using bait or lure plants (planting something you know the deer or rabbits will eat), or using a repellent spray. Most of these measures are temporary; once plants are more mature, they can withstand some browsing by deer or rabbits.
Plants are most vulnerable when they are young. These plants are tender, small, and not yet well anchored in the soil. If a plant is tiny, a rabbit could eat only a few leaves, and too much of the plant is gone for it to recover. If a plant is not entirely rooted in the ground, it could be easily yanked from the earth by a deer trying to pull leaves off the plant.
Mature plants can bounce back from browsing. In fact, like pruning, light nibbling can stimulate new growth. Some studies even show that the saliva in some animals' mouths encourages more new growth than if the plant were cut back with pruners or snips. But when a plant is just starting, it needs extra protection. That’s why we recommend using several of these methods during the first year.
Fencing + Cages
The most effective way to keep deer or rabbits out of your garden is to install a fence. For deer, it needs to be at least 8 feet tall with openings no larger than one square foot. Large fences don’t have to be permanent; temporary fencing that uses netting can be installed around newly planted areas.
For rabbits, the fences can be shorter, around two to three feet tall, and the openings need to be smaller, no larger than 1 square inch. Because rabbits can dig, this fencing should be buried 6 to 10 inches underground and bent outward at a right angle, and covered with mulch or soil.
For individual plants, you can use wire cages or tree tubes, especially on young trees or shrubs. To protect young trees and shrubs from bucks rubbing their itchy antlers on them, use a few metal stakes placed around the plant rather than wood. Metal stakes are better than wood; deer prefer to rub their antlers on wooden posts, but tend to leave metal alone.
You can get creative, too. Upside-down wire hanging baskets or small twig cages can work to protect individual plants. Follow the same spacing for fences for your cages, depending on whether you’re protecting your plants from deer or rabbits. These cages can be temporary until your young plants are established and can tolerate some herbivory.
Plant Densely (hide your plants)
Another way to protect your vulnerable plants is to “hide” them in your garden beds. A dense planting can make it harder for deer and rabbits to target their favorites. If they’re trying to nibble a flower and end up with a mouthful of mature grass leaves or mint, they’re more likely to move on. Because these animals are dining with their mouths and not using dexterous fingers or dinnerware, they cannot easily shift the plant they don’t want to eat away from their preferred meal. If we order a supreme pizza with no olives and it comes with olives, we might be annoyed that our order was messed up, but we can pick those olives off and still enjoy our pizza. Rabbits and deer don’t have this ability, and we can use this to our advantage.
Design with a mix of grasses, sedges, ferns, and strongly aromatic plants around anything that might be vulnerable. In the center, you can plant more palatable species. This matrix-style planting not only protects sensitive plants but mimics natural plant communities, which helps support local wildlife too.
Use Bait Plants
It may sound counterintuitive, but you can grow plants that you know deer or rabbits will love to eat to keep them from eating your newly planted native plants. Gardening for wildlife in suburbia often means that your garden of native plants may one of the only sources of food for these herbivores in the neighborhood. If you know that these animals will visit your yard, you can offer them plants to eat away from your new garden that you want to protect.
Some of the plants that these animals like to eat are common non-native garden plants, like daylilies, hostas and tulips. Some of them are native plants that we often refer to as weeds like wild lettuce or pokweed. You can create a sacrificial planting of these tasty plants for deer and rabbits to eat. Where can you put a garden bed like this? A back corner of your yard that you can let grow a little wild is a great area, or you can focus on the areas where the deer or rabbits in your yard prefer to spend their time.
If you want to learn more about what plants deer and rabbits enjoy eating, these are some resources to read more.
Are your flowers deer food? | Wild Ones St. Louis
Deer Browse Favorites | Mossy Oak Game Keepers
Use Repellents
If you can’t fence or cage your vulnerable new plants, a repellent spray is the way to go. For gardens in areas with heavy deer or rabbit pressure, we always recommend using a repellent spray during the first growing season. Brands like Liquid Fence are common. Most repellents smell terrible (rotten eggs, garlic, or hot peppers), which is the point. The instructions vary from brand to brand, but most need to be applied weekly and again after rain.
This strategy won’t eliminate all browsing, but it helps give your young plants a chance to establish roots and push new growth. If you don’t want to buy a repellent product, it’s easy to DIY your own stinky plant spray. Most DIY recipes use rotten eggs and garlic as the base, sometimes with hot pepper flakes or a drop of dish soap to help it stick to leaves. These ingredients are effective because sulfur compounds in eggs and allicin in garlic are highly offensive to browsing animals.
The smell is awful at first, but while it fades quickly for people, animals can detect it long after we stop noticing. DIY sprays can vary in strength and longevity. Commercial products use similar active ingredients but are formulated for consistency and longer-lasting effects.
Human and Pet Activity
Another approach is to be in your garden when deer and rabbits are around. If these animals are skittish around people, your presence may be enough to deter them. Both deer and rabbits are crepuscular, meaning they’re most active at dawn and dusk. Your family pets could also help you deter these animals, especially dogs. Not all deer or rabbits will be frightened by human or pet activity, so it highly depends on the animals in your neighborhood.
Trial, Error, and a Bit of Patience
There’s a lot of trial and error involved in gardening with deer and rabbits. What works in one yard might not work in another. What’s safe this year might be a snack next year. And sometimes, despite your best efforts, a favorite plant gets munched anyway.
The key is to start with layers of defense: plants they don’t want to eat, ways to protect the plants they do, and strategies to keep the pressure low while your garden fills in. You don’t have to do everything at once. Start with one or two changes and adjust as you observe what’s happening in your space.
And remember: your goal isn’t to make your garden completely deer or rabbit-proof. It’s to make it resilient.
Nancy Lawson, known as the Human Gardener, has written extensively about gardening with deer and rabbits and many other topics related to gardening for and with wildlife. We’re inspired by her blog and recommend you read her thoughts and advice on gardening with these wild creatures in your neighborhood.
Gardening for Deer | The Humane Gardener
Gardening with Rabbits | The Humane Gardener
Deer Eat This Garden (and it flourishes) | The Humane Gardener
Let Them Eat Plants | Nancy Lawson for American Gardener