Buttonbush

Buttonbush is fairly deer-tolerant: its toxicity makes it a less-preferred browse than most shrubs, so damage is usually light. Cage a young plant where pressure is severe until it is established, and established shrubs recover readily from light browsing.

Growth cleanly missing overnight, with the plant browsed back to a level line about as high as a deer can comfortably reach. Ragged, torn stem ends rather than the clean angled cut a rabbit leaves - the single most reliable identifier. Buds and flowers gone while the foliage below is untouched, since deer often take the best part first. Hoof prints and droppings in soft ground near the damage. Repeat visits, with fresh damage each morning once a planting has been found. On young trees, shredded and stripped bark and broken low branches in autumn - that is antler rubbing rather than feeding.

There is no chemical fix, only exclusion and recovery. Get physical protection up immediately after the first damage, because deer return to a known meal, and reinforce or rotate whatever you were relying on before. Most plants regrow from browsing if the crown and roots are intact - feed and water a grazed plant and protect the regrowth while it comes back. What does not recover in the same season is anything whose buds or flowers have been taken, and a young tree whose bark has been rubbed right around the trunk is usually lost. Where deer pressure is genuinely heavy, the honest answer is to fence properly or to grow the plants deer leave alone, rather than to keep replacing losses.

Fencing is the only thing that reliably works. Eight feet is the standard for excluding deer, or two parallel four-foot fences a few feet apart, which they will not jump because they cannot judge the landing. Short of that, cage individual plants: a sturdy wire cage or trunk guard around every young tree, left on until the trunk is thick and the canopy is above browse height, prevents both browsing and antler rubbing and is the single highest-value thing you can do for a young tree. Repellent sprays do help at moderate pressure, but they wash off and deer habituate, so reapply after rain and rotate between different types through the season. Motion-activated sprinklers, scent deterrents, and noise devices work for a while and then stop. Siting matters too: plants close to the house, in daily traffic, and screened behind other planting get browsed less than the same plant out at the boundary.

Deer are the largest garden problem across much of the country, and where pressure is high they set the limit on what you can grow at all. They browse at night and around dawn and dusk, taking tender shoots, leaves, buds, flowers, and fruit within about five feet of the ground, and they come back night after night to anything they have found and liked. Because they have no upper incisors they tear rather than cut, leaving ragged stem ends - that is how you tell deer damage from a rabbit's clean angled cut. In fall, bucks rub their antlers on young trunks and can strip the bark right around a stem, which kills a young tree outright. Palatability varies enormously between plants and between seasons: a herd short of food in late winter eats things it ignores in June, and no plant is truly deer-proof.

Buttonbush is naturally quite disease-resistant, tolerates spotting, and flushes clean growth. Keeping it properly wet matters far more here than anything you could spray.

Small brown, dark, reddish or purple-bordered spots and blotches on the leaves during prolonged humid, rainy spells, sometimes enlarging and merging, with premature yellowing or leaf drop on the worst-affected growth.

Remove badly affected leaves and improve airflow; that is normally the whole of it. The plant flushes clean new growth once the weather turns. Fungicide is seldom warranted for a cosmetic leaf spot on an established plant.

Give the plant airflow - space, thin or prune it rather than letting the growth mat together - avoid overhead watering, and water early in the day so the foliage dries. Rake up and remove fallen leaves, which is where these fungi overwinter, and keep the plant unstressed and properly watered.

A catch-all for the various fungal leaf-spot diseases that blotch foliage in warm, humid, wet weather. They spot and yellow the leaves and sometimes bring on early leaf drop, and they are worst on crowded, shaded or overhead-watered plants and on anything already stressed. On a healthy, well-sited plant they are a cosmetic nuisance that comes and goes with the weather rather than a real threat.