“You go through phases where you want colors to be all matchy, matchy. But eventually, when you’ve done gardening for decades, you just want plants that live and plants that remind you of someone,” said one of my long time gardening friends and mentors yesterday, while we interviewed each other. She told me about deer, muck, floods, dry sand dunes, people who want matchy matchy flowers but live in the woods—all of her challenges over decades of gardening in the low country.

But I stumped her with the border I was working on… a long, linear perennial boarder browsed by deer on one side and black angus cattle on the other.

“Oh Dear.”

We reviewed my plant list and agreed it seems right. All the plants have really smelly leaves or alkaloids in the leaves. Yes we know, a hungry herd will eat anything.

Progress!

But we did have a base to start with—all the things not eaten over the past few years. Chrysanthemum, Iris, Hedychium. All those will go into my filemaker plants database and be tagged with deer proof. And we know to protect tasty plants by interplanting with repellent plants.

For example, Cosmos interseeded into Tagetes as in the photo above.

We also did this planting, exactly, exactly right. No rush, all the new plants pre-soaked in a tub of bacterial inoculate and kelp fertilizer. All the root balls massaged, split a bit, and put at exactly the right depth. Dirt pushed around, everything watered in by hand, with a hose. Old school, slow bake gardening. None of that microwave, instant gratification gardening for me anymore. All this work and fun with two young men, who love doing it, who’ve just started Tech School and get to learn from, well, to be part of a three generation team of gardeners.

One of the smelly leafed plants they learned today, will, in the years to come, bring back a scented memory of some old lady, me, deer and cows.

Deer Resistant Perennials for The South

For Spring Flowers

Caryopteris divericata ‘Snow Queen’
Leucojum ‘Gravety Giant’
Salvia ‘Fuji Snow’
Baptisia ‘Carolina Moonlight’

For Summer Flowers

Salvia ‘Henry Duelberg’
Agastachi ‘Blue Fortune’

For Fall & Winter Flowers

Tagetes lemonii
Salvia glabrescnes ‘Momobana’
Kniphofiphia ‘Riverbanks Strain’
Teucrium fruticans