Sue Newell's little boulevard area in front of her Pine Street home had just about everything going against it for growing a garden.

The soil, if you could call it that, was mostly just leftover road mix from when the street was extended eastward in the 1970s.

And, of course, there were the deer -- living directly on the urban-wildland interface, with the trailhead to the Acropolis Trail at the edge of her yard, Newell had a yard that basically served as the hungry ungulates' dining room.

But Newell was intent on growing a colorful garden that could stand up to these harsh conditions.

"My requirements were that it had to exist with deer, be able to grow in extremely poor soil and be drought-tolerant," Newell said. "I wanted perennials, not annuals. Oh, and I wanted to have six months of blooms."

She also didn't want to fence and didn't want to mess with sprays and various gardeners' home remedies -- "I got sick of messing with that stuff."

So in about 2002, Newell set to work, putting in plants that deer had not been known to eat.

She found what many other local gardeners have also learned: The deer hadn't endorsed those lists.

The list of supposedly deer-resistant flowers that were promptly munched after planting is a long one.

Gaillardias. Asters. Columbines. Sedums. Mallows. Goldenrods. Soapwort. Hollyhocks.

"I gave up on the hollyhocks," Newell said. "(The deer) eat the heck out of them."

But there were plenty of successes along the way, too, and by last summer, Newell had come up with a pretty, low-maintenance garden with an ever-changing palette of colors -- and that remains virtually untouched by deer.

Rock cresses, with their delicate white flowers, bloom in April, joined in May by the bright yellow blooms of basket of gold.

Lavender-colored hesperis blooms at the end of May, while pussy toes, a native plant with pinkish-white flowers, flower through June.

Newell calls catmint -- with its striking deep purple flowers extending toward the sky -- the mainstay of the garden. The plant, which is in the same genus as catnip, starts blooming in June, keeping its color throughout the summer.

According to Toby Day, horticulture specialist with the Montana State University Extension Service, there's really no such thing as a deer-proof garden.

"Really the only thing that makes a deer-resistant garden is an 8-foot fence," Day said.

Day said Extension's partial list of deer-resistant plants, available for free online, is really a list of plants the animals don't prefer. If hungry enough, the deer will eat just about anything.

Also, Day said, tastes can vary by species -- what a whitetail finds unpalatable, the mule deer that inhabit Helena might think is quite tasty.

Still he said the list, developed by MSU horticulture professor Bob Gough, is a good place to start.

As far as Newell's concerned, her little plot is just about bomb proof, without a fen ce. Other than a nibble or two off a penstemon, the garden is just about untouched.

She even finds that plants deer normally eat through right away, like geaniums, remain safe if they're tucked under other less palatable samples.

By July, there is a variety of yarrows -- white, coronation gold, paprika. And later in the summer, the pale violet-blue of the Russian sage and the beautiful yellow rabbit brush fill up the canvas.

"Every week or two, there's new things," she said.

And -- other than pulling weeds -- the garden has proven to be pretty much maintenance free. As of a week ago, Newell had watered only twice since April.

"If it's hot and dry in the late summer, I'll water once a week. That's not bad," she said. "It's possible. If they can grow here, they can grow anywhere."

Click here for Montana State Extension's partial list of deer-resistant ornamentals.

Features editor Joe Menden: joe.menden@helenair.com

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