Planting defensively, part two
Deer- and rabbit-resistant perennials (that we actually grow)
Perennials raise the stakes: an annual eaten in June is a bad week, but a perennial eaten every June is a bad investment. The good news is that some of the toughest, longest-lived perennials on our benches are also the ones deer and rabbits reliably walk past. Same honesty as our annuals guide — "resistant" means usually skipped, never guaranteed.
Peony
Decades of June blooms, and browsers never touch them
Catmint
Months of purple haze — the scent deer detour around
Foxglove
Toxic to browsers — which is exactly why it's never browsed
Lamb's Ear
Velvet to your hand, wool in their mouth
The sunny border backbone
Build the bones of an unfenced bed from these and you'll sleep fine: catmint, perennial salvia, Russian sage, and yarrow (aromatic, all four), peonies (untouched for a century in farmyards for a reason), baptisia, gaillardia, coneflowers, veronica, dianthus, obedient plant, balloon flower, helenium, goldenrod, centaurea, ice plant, and lupine. For drama, delphinium, Oriental poppies, red hot poker, and yucca — armored, bitter, or both. And monkshood closes the season about as close to deer-proof as nature gets (it's genuinely toxic, so plant it away from where kids and pets graze too).
Shade beds they leave alone
Shade is where most people get burned, because the classic shade plant — hosta — is the deer's favorite food on Earth. Build instead with astilbe, brunnera, pulmonaria, lamium, foamflower, goatsbeard, bleeding heart, columbine, coral bells, Jacob's ladder, snowdrop anemone, and great blue lobelia. That's a full, layered shade garden with nothing on the menu.
Natives and grasses: the low-drama layer
Our MN Native badge overlaps heavily with this list — milkweeds (milky sap), bee balm and mountain mint (aromatic), Joe Pye weed, boneset, ironweed, and little bluestem all shrug off browsing. Ornamental grasses — Karl Foerster, switchgrass, blue fescue — are almost never touched, and lamb's ear, artemisia, and ornamental alliums round out the texture layer with fuzz and onion breath.
The perennial candy list
Protect or fence these four, because resistance lists won't save them: hostas (deer dessert), daylilies (the flower buds especially), tall garden phlox, and roses. Rabbits add their own targets: campanula, young coreopsis shoots, and almost anything freshly planted and tender — a cheap ring of chicken wire for a plant's first spring pays for itself.