Four Ferns To Foil Deer In The Garden

While deer will eat just about anything in late winter and early spring when there are few other foods left, they pretty much ignore ferns. If portions of your garden are in partial or full shade, these four ferns can add a lush woodland, or even tropical, look to your space with little upkeep. In contemporary and classical-style landscapes, clumps of ferns can be planted in pairs, in ground or in pots, for a more formal look.

These four ferns will also thrive in sun, provided they are kept sufficiently moist. All ferns prefer a somewhat acidic soil. 


 Dixie Wood Fern. This fern is a natural hybrid of two native ferns (Log Fern and the Southern Wood fern) and is hardy in Zones 5 –9. Its main advantages in the garden are its height and tolerance of dry shade and more sun than most ferns. Because it grows 4 - 6 feet tall on sturdy stems, it creates a nice background for shorter ferns and shade-loving flowers, or a vertical accent in a perennial border.



Japanese Tassel Fern. This is a dark green, fuzzy-stemmed garden fern that also tolerates dry shade and mild drought and is hardy in Zones 5 –9. It will do well in partial sun or shade, growing to about 18 inches. Its appeal is its thick, dark, shiny, evergreen foliage, which goes well with cut flowers.
 


Marsh Fern. Occurring naturally at the edges of marshlands and wet meadows, the Marsh Fern loves rich, moist soils in sunny areas but won't grow in standing water. These traits make it ideal for planting near ponds or streams, where it can grow to about 2 feet in height.



Sensitive Fern. Another common native, this fern thrives around wet meadows and woods, swamps, and stream banks. While it grows best in part or full shade, it can thrive in full sun if kept wet. It is very sensitive to frost (hence the name) and grows 2 – 3 feet tall. Its wide, light-green leaflets, create a nice contrast with other ferns. 

 Search Amazon.com for ferns

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have
Keep reading