Monthly Archives: August 2025

Design trends

Outsmarting Deer

Coneflowers (echinacea) are usually safe from deer browsing due to their hairy stems and leaves and bitter taste but not always.

So you’ve planted only “deer resistant” plants but last night your coneflowers were eaten. You’ve been waiting all season to cut some for a bouquet. What else can you do to save your flowers from thirsty deer? Here are some techniques that may help. They are worth a try.

A Facebook friend posts photos taken of her yard with lots of turkeys and deer families. How can you not love a picture of those cute fawns covered with spots?

At this time of year last year’s youngsters are being chased away by their deer mothers. In heavily wooded areas their territory may be only the square mile right around where they were born and since they eat about 5 pounds of food per day which would fill a large garbage bag, your garden is this year’s smorgasbord. Eating mostly semi-woody plants they supplement this with soft foliage and, as we all know, our beloved flowers. They browse, moving from place to place seeking plants that taste good and have a high protein content. Knowing their habits can be your advantage. Don’t let them make a habit of eating in your garden. Employ some of the following techniques before they print out a menu of your plants.

There are many barriers you can use to keep deer out of your garden like mesh fencing, deer netting, chicken wire or fishing line. Two short fences a few feet apart can also keep them out. Frightening devices that hook up to your hose work well, too. But if you can’t fence your area then the following tips may help.

Protect young fruit and nut trees by encircling the trunk with fencing to a height of 6 ft. You can remove it after the tree has grown taller and can be limbed up.

Plant deer resistant plants as well as plants that deter deer. Make sure deer find the entryway to your garden unattractive. Concentrate deer repelling plants here. Highly fragrant plants jam the deers’ predator-alert sensors and make them uneasy. Try planting catmint, chives, lavender, sage, society garlic, thyme or yarrow around your favorite plants that they usually eat and you may have better luck this year.

Jam their senses with repellents like fermented eggs solids, mint, rosemary oil and garlic, You can buy these ready-to-use or in concentrates and are very effective. The idea is that you spray directly on the plants and the surrounding area two weeks in a row and then afterwards monthly. They stay on the plants through the rain but keeping it fresh during the peak spring browsing period and late summer when deer are thirsty is a good idea. Soap bars are effective for small areas for short periods. You would have to use 450 bars per acre for a large area. Deer get used to the smell of hair real quick and so it isn’t effective for very long either. Blood meal and sprays are effective also but can attract predators.

Taste repellents must be sprayed directly on the plants you want to protect and don’t use them on food plants. You can buy hot pepper spray or mix it yourself: 2 tablespoons hot pepper sauce, 1 gal water, 1 tablespoon liquid dish soap. Another spray you can make up yourself: 5 tablespoons cayenne pepper, 1 tablespoon cooking oil, 1 gal water.

My personal list of deer resistant plants that are flourishing in the shade are philodendron selloum, all ferns, liriope, mondo grass, Queen’s Tears hardy bromeliad, aspidistra or cast iron plant, bamboo in containers, podocarpus, carex grass, Japanese maple, fragrant sarcococca, clivia, calla lily, sago palm. douglas iris and hellebore.

There are many deer resistant plants for the sun, too. The main thing is to start using one or several of these ideas now before deer establish their feeding grounds.

Design trends

Living with Deer

With their hairy leaves, Black-eyed Susan’s are usually avoided by deer.

With those big brown doe eyes and the cute fawns who doesn’t enjoy seeing deer, as long as they’re not in your yard. Around my place they only visit very occasionally which is the worst as I forget they might come at any time and don’t spray on a regular basis. My ornamental sunflower buds were munched and that reminds me, it’s time to spray.

I spray with Squirrel Stopper (I have a squirrel problem, too) as it’s similar to some of the deer repellents with rosemary oil, corn mint oil, putrescent eggs solids and cinnamon oil but doesn’t smell as bad as some of the deer repellents. I don’t need to spray the zinnias, cosmos or Black-eyed Susan’s but they really loved the agapanthus flowers.The hummingbirds were devastated. Picky deer, I guess. But are there any other safe plants that deer seem to avoid?

If you have a resident deer population you can still have a beautiful garden. Recently I dropped by a garden that I designed to see how it was doing. When I arrived one big buck bounded out of the main garden and another leaped out of a side section when it saw me. I was pleasantly surprised that the plant palette that I chose wasn’t even nibbled a tiny bit. I don’t know what they were doing in the garden but it wasn’t eating any flowers or foliage. Deer don’t read those lists and their taste varies with the season but I can personally vouch for Achillea ‘Coronation Gold’, Russian sage, leucospermum, asparagus ‘Myer’, Kangaroo Paw, Fortnight Lily, Radiant manzanita, Mt Tamboritha grevillea and lantana.

There are native plants that are poisonous for us but only some of them are avoided by deer. It got me thinking. How do deer eat poisonous plants without apparent ill effect?

Deer are browsers. They thrive on a mixed diet. You’ve seen them eat a few roses then saunter over to the abutilon and then on to the daylily flowers. Deer will eat almost anything, even plants with a strong scent like catmint, lavender or thyme when they are hungry or need water. They can even eat a few bites of various toxic plants.

According to Tom Hanley, a wildlife biologist with the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, “There seems to be threshold levels for the toxicity of different plants, and as long as deer eat below that threshold, they’re okay.” Plant toxicity varies with the time of year also and flowers may be less toxic than leaves or roots. They just mix it up.

That explains the eating habits of deer but what about us?

Many of us are including native plants in our landscapes to attract wildlife and save water and resources. Here are some common native plants that you should be aware of if you have small children. This list comes from
Borstein, Foss and O’Brian- California Native plants for the Garden.

Coffeeberry- leaves, berries and bark
California buckeye- all parts (poisonous to bees also)
Western azalea- all parts
Elderberry- all parts except ripe berries and fruit
Solanum-all parts
Snowberry-berries
California buttercup- juice of the plant
Berberis- roots and leaves
Prunus ( cherry )- seeds
California poppy- all parts
Lupine (annual)- seeds, fresh leaves and stems.

Mostly though, native plants make great additions to the garden. They tend to be well behaved and are rarely invasive. Birds and butterflies rely on them for food, shelter and nesting. And best of all they are beautiful.
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When I’m designing with native plants I find the following plants are fairly safe around deer. They are not perfectly safe at all times of the year but they are usually avoided.

Artemisia also called Ca. sagebrush
Asarum – Wild ginger
Baccharis – Dwf coyote brush
Ceanothus ‘Julia Phelps’
Eriogonum – Ca. buckwheat
Douglas iris
Mimulus auritanicus – Sticky monkey flower
Monardella – Coyote mint
Ribes speciosum – Fuchsia-flowering gooseberry
Salvia

Enjoy your garden. Let the deer browse elsewhere and be aware of plants that may be toxic to children.
Next week I’ll give you some good techniques that help deter deer.

Design trends

Butterflies, Butterflies

Western Swallowtail enoying the nectar of a Butterfly Bush.

My Butterfly Bush (buddleja dividii) has started to bloom and it’s a Western Swallowtail butterfly magnet. Butterfly species each have their own life cycle and habits and it’s fascinating to watch them as they go about their lives.

I live on Boulder Creek where the steep banks are covered with blackberries. The Himalayan blackberry has choked out the native species here but the swallowtail butterflies visit the white flowers regularly to harvest nectar. Later in the summer they will relish the ripe berries.

Summer butterflies live only for a week or two. During that time the butterflies mainly search for food and a mate. They have a keen sense of sight, smell and taste. Having large eyes they can see many colors including those in the ultraviolet range that we can’t see. Many flowers have ultraviolet patterns that butterflies find especially attractive. Butterflies can detect movement better than we can. If you’ve tried to get a photo of one in your garden you know how hard it is to sneak up on them.

In addition to chemical receptors on their antennae, butterflies can taste food with their tongue and even their feet. They have thousands of dusty scales that cover their wings and body and absorb heat. They can make their wings tremble to speed up the warming process and even orient their wings to the sun to absorb heat more quickly.

Last year there was a huge hatch of Tortoiseshell butterflies looking for nectar of our native ceanothus. The California Tortoiseshell butterfly is a common butterfly that lays its eggs on ceanothus. After the CZU fire we have an abundance of this succession plant as the soil-stored seeds germinated after the fire broke their dormancy. These seedlings can account for more than half of the plants present in burn areas. If you’ve visited Big Basin State Park or any of the other burn areas, ceanothus are pretty darn happy with all the extra space and sun they are now getting.

Tortoiseshell butterflies have an interesting life cycle as do all butterflies. With three generations per year, they fly here from the Sierra foothills where they lay their eggs on ceanothus. Then those hatch and feed, morph into butterflies who fly to the foothills to repeat the process. Larval food plants include several species of Ceanothus. Adults feed on flower nectar, sap, fruit and mud. They live for 10 months or more.

The Tortoiseshell is no stranger to our mountain. After the Lockheed fire this same phenomena happened when the ceanothus were head-high. After hatching here they took flight to the mid-elevation Sierra Nevada to lay eggs on a different species of Ceanothus. After that generation denuded the patches of Ceanothus there those adults flew to the highest elevations to eat yet a different species of Ceanothus. Then the adults flew all the way back to Monterey Bay to lay eggs on our Ceanothus and start the cycle over again.

We have about 90 species of butterflies in the Monterey Bay Area. Many of these occur only in our mountains, forests and chaparral environments. They are easy to attract and make a permanent feature in your landscape. Here’s how.

A butterfly garden should include plants that accommodate all stages of the life cycle – egg, larvae, pupa and adult . When both adult nectar and larval host plants are available, they will attract and support a butterfly population. In addition to the right plants, your garden should also have sun, a water source, protection from wind and plants in clusters. When maintaining your garden avoid the use of insecticides, including BT.

As adults, most butterflies feed on the nectar of flowers. Some local butterflies, like the Mourning Cloak and Red Admiral, feed primarily on rotting fruit or tree sap for moisture and nutrients while the California Sister feeds on aphid honeydew.

In the larval stage, most butterfly species are limited to a single plant family and occasionally a single genus. To attract more Western Tiger Swallowtails, for instance, provide larval host plants such as willow, sycamore, alder, big leaf maple, sycamore, plum and ash. Common Buckeye lay their eggs on mimulus and verbena while California Sister use the coast and canyon live oak. Planting a variety of grasses and shrubs like ceanothus, buckwheat, coffeeberry, bush lupine,manzanita and perennials like redwood violet, California aster and wallflower will attract a variety of local butterflies. If your garden is near a wild area that naturally supports the caterpillar stage, you can plant just the nectar plants to attract butterflies to your garden.

Filling your garden with nectar producing flowers is the fun part. Adult butterflies rely on sugar-rich nectar for their daily fuel. Different species have different flower color and shape preferences. Many butterflies produce scents that attract the opposite sex and many of these scents smell like the flowers that they are attracted to and visit. The scent of these butterfly-pollinated flowers may have evolved as an adaptation to ensure their survival.

Butterflies typically favor flat, clustered flowers that provide a landing pad although larger butterflies can feed on penstemon and salvias while hovering. Unlike bees, butterflies can see red and are attracted to brightly colored flowers. Pink, red, orange, yellow and purple are the most attractive nectar source flower colors but they also use blue and white.

Consider the blooming time of each plant. Having plants blooming in the sun for many hours in the day will lengthen your viewing time. Nectar rich flowers include yarrow, aster, verbena, scabiosa, buckwheat, toyon, salvia, erysimum, zinnia, lantana and coneflower.

In addition to nectar, butterflies need a source of water and salts. A patch of mud kept wet year round or a shallow depression lined with pebbles and kept moist will work fine. Also provide some flat rocks for them to bask in the sun in an area protected from the wind by shrubs.

Having a garden filled with birds, bees, butterflies and other pollinators is fun and easy.