My current garden is a shadow of its former self and gets more sparse each year as the urban deer herd increases in number. However, a few stalwart plants persist.

In spring I still have hellebores, winter aconite, snowdrops, and many daffodils. These are followed by Virginia bluebells, celandine poppies, lily of the valley and iris.

When the peonies bloom, the garden is spectacular as I have so many, but after that, in the summer I have to rely on the few annuals and perennials that the deer dislike and that number is shrinking. They don’t eat my pretty blue flowering shrub Baptisia, and it used to be that they avoided the annual lantana, but now they have developed a taste for it.

Annuals like million bells, euphorbia ‘Diamond Frost’, salvias, marigolds, gomphrena, Angelonia, and the perennial coral bells and bleeding heart still persist. And all perennial geraniums and cleome (spider flower) sometimes also called cats’ whiskers are safe so far.

Lavender, like all aromatic herbs is also safe. In high summer, zinnias and cool pink August lilies provide welcome color, as well as our stalwart native perennials monarda and Echinacea and annual celosia.

Black-Eyed Susans in July are not quite as immune as they used to be, and neither are all of the yellow stalwarts like helianthus and heliopsis. which belong to the sunflower clan.

Verbena persists most of the time, and the very aggressive native blue mist flower keeps trying to take over.

Some of my mums now get eaten and some asters but not the prolific tiny white wood asters, so far!!!

This is Moya Andrews, and today we focused on… what’s left.