Eating your plants — a short introduction to this piece.
Eating your plants: Quick Notes
This is part of a series with Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to toxic-free, ecological gardening, on how you can be more sustainable in your landscapes at home.
For more than two decades, Nancy Lawson has been living in harmony with deer. Sure, they’re in her Maryland yard every single day. Yes, they come to eat, rest, and, occasionally, rut. But, no, they don’t destroy her garden. In fact, it’s thriving. “We made a commitment to creating habitat for all animals,” says the nature writer, naturalist, and founder of Humane Gardener. “We manage for resilience.”
White-tailed deer populations have soared in this century. Since we wiped out nearly all their predators (grey wolves and mountain lions) and have taken over their natural habitat (developing 95 percent of the land in the US), they look for food and shelter anywhere they can find it, and that’s often in our gardens. As a result, their public image has gone from beloved Bambi to super villain—through no fault of their own.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Lawson shares with us how we can all happily coexist with deer.
Photography by Nancy Lawson, unless otherwise noted. (Featured photograph above by @anoldent via Flickr.)
Plant densely and employ “protector plants.”
Above: Lawson has combined tasty and less tasty plants along a pathway that deer traverse, including common sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), blue mistflower (Conoclinium coelestinum), late boneset (Eupatorium serotinum), and American burnweed (Erechtites hieraciifolius).
Walk through a nature preserve or forest and you won’t find plants spread out like polkadots poking out of a sea of mulch. “We never put a plant out in the open by itself,” says Lawson. “It’s not how it grows in nature.” In the wild, plants grow in communities. They mingle. They intertwine. Having an array of varieties growing densely prevents any one plant from being decimated. “If there’s a big mixture that includes some less palatable plants, deer are much less likely to devour a given area,” says Lawson. “But if I have all the same species lined up for 10 feet, and it’s tasty, then that’s really easy for them to eat it all.” Think about planting as you would companion-planting in a vegetable garden, says Lawson, and mix it up.
Eating your plants appears here to highlight key ideas for readers.
