Five deer feast on Cathy Lawless' English ivy so often that the Vienna resident has become accustomed seeing the does in her yard.
"There are five does that go around," Lawless said. "We call it the ladies club. They eat the lilacs and the ground cover I have."
Down the street from Lawless' house at Meadowlark Gardens park, deer eating the plants had become so bad that the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority invested in a 10-foot fence. According to Tammy Burke, horticulturist at Meadowlark, the deer ate so many plants, they had to practically start over replanting the park.
"We didn't plant anything new because they devastated all our plants. There wasn't much left, I wouldn't have called it a garden," Burke said.
Spring signals the beginning of the cycle pitting deer against the gardener. With the open space available for deer to roam shrinking, the fresh flowers and shrubbery around neighborhoods become an inviting feast. At Burke Garden and Nursery, the shelves are stocked with chemical deterrents "Liquid Fence" and "Bob Ex" as well as plenty of plants to replace the ones that have been eaten. Springfield resident Roberta Walker works among the plants at the nursery.
"They'll eat anything," Walker said. "They [customers] try to find plants the deer don't eat."
Walker recommended thorned plants, but even that won't fend off a hungry deer. One book available at Burke Nursery, "Gardening in Deer Country," has a grading system for plants, in which an 'A' listed plant is attractive to deer and an 'F' is absolutely not. Snapdragons is an 'A' where Balsam Fir rates an 'F.' Fairfax Station residents Cathy and Andy Von Canon were looking for plants to replace the latest deer feast in their garden.
"We're replacing what they ate," Cathy Von Canon said. "It gets expensive."
Andy Von Canon had some tomato plants in a pot on the porch, but he soon learned they weren't safe either.
"They've eaten everything," he said. "All my tomatoes and that were up on the deck."
REPELLENTS WORK to some extent, according to Laurie Short, a horticulturist at Meadowlark. She works at protecting the tulips outside the fence at the front of the park. Short has experimented with blood meal, sprays, Tree Guard and Bob Ex. She finds the deer get used to the chemicals.
"If you switch around, that will help. I do it every week and I switch, which isn't following the directions. It gets to the point where the spray seems to attract them," Short said.
Meadowlark Gardens park manager Keith Tomlinson points to the ecological signals and the overall forest health issues as causes for the influx of deer.
"This has an effect on the entire ecosystem," Tomlinson said.
Larry Hurley, perennial specialist, wrote an article "Deer-Threat or Menace?" that's available at Burke Garden & Nursery. According to Hurley, two kinds of repellents are available: contact repellent, which is applied directly to the plant and has a bad taste, and area repellents, which are put near the plants and have a strong smell. Three factors affect how successful a contact repellent can be: rainfall, how thoroughly it is applied, and how hungry the deer are.
Walker doesn't blame the animals.
"We're taking away their land and resources," Walker said.