It’s always exciting for our family when a deer visits the yard. This one has come and gone for a few days now and even had a fawn with it one of the days.
I’m not about to suggest that deer visit our yard just because we have native plants- I know deer visit many other yards to eat their non-native roses, tulips, etc. But I did notice that most of the plants in our yard that were snacked upon are natives. Most of them are in our rain garden, shown below.
In most cases the deer eats the ends off of the red-twig dogwood and native rose branches, leaving a nice pruned cut. It has been about a week since the first branches were eaten and new growth has already started to form.
Above is a “pruned” dogwood branch. The deer leaves a messy cut but the new growth is bursting out as though I had pruned it myself!
This cut is on my High Cranberry Bush. Again, the new growth is looking robust.
Like I said, we like having deer visit the yard. They eat some plants, but almost everything grows back and some (like the plants shown above) I would be pruning soon anyway. Of course, I have to be careful. Once the deer finds what is shown below in my yard, it might decide to eat a lot more to exact revenge…
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