When it comes to landscape gardening, I’m all about perennials. They are the ultimate of “work smarter, not harder” in gardening.

Here’s my shortlist of recommendations for deer and critter-resistant perennials that also stand up to an amateur gardener. Trust me, there’s no tougher test out there than the Ringel gardens:

• Silver mound
• Sage
• Dianthus
• Little bluestem
• Black-eyed susans
• Coneflowers
• Ornamental onion (allium)
• Balloon flowers (one rabbit incident)
• Milkweed (only on the edges, and only for the butterflies)
• Asiatic lilies (with caveats, see below for experience)

When we moved to our home in the Driftless area of Wisconsin, I had a lot of garden clean-up to do. The back area became a rock garden with a few perennials and some squash:

The front garden became the perennial testbed. Since all manner of critters traipse through, the perennials have to especially stand up to deer, rabbits, 13-lined ground squirrels, and groundhogs. Five years in, here is what is thriving:

In front is another silver mound with sage (purple) and dianthus (pink) right behind it. The taller yellow and pink flowers currently blooming are asiatic lilies:

To be honest, I didn’t choose these. When I dug up the garden area, I kept finding bulbs, so I planted them. The lilies are just what came up. This fall I will have to spread them out again, as there seem to be far more plants than I planted five years ago. I’ve seen a couple young deer try the petals but they mostly leave the lilies alone. Do you know what doesn’t? Thirteen-lined ground squirrels. They will reach up or even climb up a plant to get at the petals. I’d be mad if I paid for the bulbs, but I didn’t. They don’t eat them all, and it’s mostly the young ones who don’t know to eat anything better or are having a hard time of it. Since I have so many lilies, I don’t miss a few petals here and there.

Among the lilies are a few coneflower plants, not yet blooming. They have been doing well but are getting crowded by the lilies. I’m planning to redistribute the lilies in the fall to give the coneflowers some space. I also want to try moving a few of the black-eyed susans in the rock garden area to this garden.

Down the center of the garden I have three “double blue” balloon flower plants. The one in front is smaller than the other two because a couple young rabbits found it delicious one summer. Still, that plant came back and is recovering a little every year. Points for hardiness, and the other two have gone untouched. When the balloon flowers finally bloom, I’ll take pictures and show them off. I’d never heard of the plant before, but the flowers start out looking like little hot air balloons before they open up. It’s quite charming.

Ornamental onion is on the far right of the main picture, along with some milkweed that is wild but I let grow because butterflies love it. Milkweed will propagate like mad from aggressive rhizomes underground. It was there and beyond when I cleaned the garden up and I let it hang out on the edge. Again, more pictures when everything blooms and I have some butterfly visitors.

Everything described above has survived not only an onslaught of critters but my own neglect. I’m not a careful waterer, so these are pretty drought resistant too. I’ll water in a serious heat wave, that’s about it.

What hasn’t survived my garden? I had two yarrow plants that didn’t come back this year. They are supposed to be deer-resistant and I didn’t notice anyone attacking them from above. It’s possible their roots were disrupted by ground squirrels from below? The deer water bucket is now in the back corner so I didn’t replace the yarrow. As it turns out, deer also leave petunias alone.

Besides the petunias, the only other annual I’ve tried is gomphrena, an impulse buy this year because the tag said pollinators love it. The critters have left it alone as well:

There’s plenty of room in my perennial garden yet for an expanded selection and an impulse buy or two of annuals, but I’ve been too busy to research more options. The nice thing about a perennial garden is you don’t have to start over every year and can take your time.