This past winter we got our first snowfall on Thanksgiving, and the snow cover was in place until spring. This made it a little hard on the deer, especially since our deer seem to rely primarily on landscaping for food, especially in the winter, and a lot of people do successfully fence them out of shrubs. You have to be serious about your fences or the deer will just go over them or under them. Our next door neighbors put loops of fence around their Rhododendrons, but they did not anchor the fence with T-posts. One day they looked out the window and there was a deer behind the fence.
The deer was behind the fence below and as you can see, there is no way they could jump into that. They just squeezed between the fence post and the wall. Is it not a little ironic that the leaves they ate were behind the fence, not above it....
The neighbors had thought previously of pulling these over grown shrubs, but having seen similar damage on other shrubs before I suggested that they just cut them to the ground and let them grow back fresh. I knew of two other neighborhood houses who had, in the past, done this and I had watched the result. So the last week of March they cut them down.
Not much left there! I suggested they give them a good dose of granular fertilizer and just wait.
It wasn't long before they began to grow. I made sure to take pictures through the spring and summer to track their progress.
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| End of May |
Two of them came back thick.
The new growth is glossy and healthy.
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| Mid-August |
The regrown shrubs are more proportionate to the other landscape.
One of them is lagging behind a bit. I suggested that they go ahead and cut these bare trunks back further since no new growth is coming from them. The new growth on this shrub is coming only from the roots.
And this winter make sure to anchor their fence with posts!
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