When the Foothills Dry Out: Protecting Your Summer Garden from Thirsty Wildlife

Most wildlife protection advice for gardeners is written for spring. Watch out for rabbits in April. Fence your vegetable beds before the deer find them in May. That advice isn’t wrong, but it addresses only the first wave. Here in Colorado Springs, the second wave is larger, more desperate, and far more destructive.

It arrives in July.

By midsummer, the lush high-altitude meadows and creek corridors that keep wildlife populations well-fed through June have largely dried out. Wildflower blooms are fading. Grasses on south-facing slopes have gone dormant and brittle. Natural water sources that fed wildlife through snowmelt season have stopped flowing or reduced to a fraction of their spring volume. The mountains that seemed so full of life just weeks ago are showing their dry season face, and the animals that depended on that forage are beginning to move downhill in search of something better.

What they find, in neighborhoods like Kissing Camels, Broadmoor, Mountain Shadows, and across the western edges of Colorado Springs, is something remarkable from a wildlife perspective: lush, irrigated, deliberately planted residential landscapes loaded with tender vegetation and, in many cases, no meaningful barriers to access. Your garden, to a drought-stressed mule deer that has walked two miles downslope in search of calories, looks like an oasis.

This is the wildlife pressure pattern that most landscaping guides completely ignore. And at Fredell Enterprises, it’s one of the most important factors we account for when designing gardens for any Colorado Springs property that backs onto open space, borders a drainage corridor, or sits anywhere in the foothills interface.

Understanding what changes in the wildlife equation between May and July helps explain why mid-to-late summer damage often surprises even experienced Colorado Springs gardeners.

In spring, wildlife is active but well-fed. Natural forage is abundant — new growth everywhere, snowmelt water in every draw, and food sources spread across a wide elevation range. Deer and rabbits visit residential gardens partly out of opportunity and partly out of preference. If your hostas are particularly appealing, they’ll eat them. But they’re not desperate, and they exercise more selectivity. Strongly scented plants, unfamiliar textures, or minor deterrents are often enough to redirect them to easier targets elsewhere.

By late July, the calculus has changed entirely. Wildlife populations are now nutritionally stressed. Does are managing fawns that require significant caloric investment. Bucks are building body mass for the fall rut. Rabbits have produced multiple litters through the summer and the local population is at its annual peak. And all of these animals are working harder for fewer calories in the natural landscape.

Desperation changes feeding behavior in measurable ways. Plants that deer categorically ignored in May — strongly-scented herbs, coarser textures, even some species considered reliably deer-resistant — start getting sampled when the animal hasn’t found adequate forage elsewhere. Rabbits begin hitting plants at heights and in locations they wouldn’t bother with in spring. Physical deterrents that worked earlier in the season lose effectiveness because the cost-benefit calculation for the animal has shifted. When food is scarce enough, the inconvenience of navigating a deterrent becomes worth it.

There’s also a behavioral habituation factor at play. Wildlife that has spent the summer slowly becoming more comfortable at lower elevations, first in wild areas adjacent to neighborhoods, then at the edges of developed properties, is progressively less wary by August. Animals that would have bolted at a porch light in May may ignore it entirely by late July. The bold deer calmly standing in someone’s front yard at 6 PM in Broadmoor in August isn’t unusual behavior. It’s the predictable end product of a summer-long process.

Deer and rabbits are the consistent threat to gardens throughout the season, but the late summer wildlife shift brings a more serious visitor to some Colorado Springs neighborhoods. Black bears, following the same logic as deer, move to lower elevations as high-altitude food sources become scarce ahead of their hyperphagia period — the intense pre-hibernation feeding phase that typically intensifies in August and September.

Bears aren’t primarily interested in your garden beds. They’re looking for calorie-dense food sources: fruit trees, berry-producing shrubs, beehives, and anything that smells like food. But a bear moving through a neighborhood in search of a fruit tree will pass directly through garden spaces, and even incidental contact with a vegetable bed or ornamental planting can cause significant physical damage independent of any intentional feeding.

If your property includes apple trees, crabapples, pear trees, raspberries, Saskatoon serviceberries, or other fruiting plants visible from the foothills interface, late summer is the period to be most attentive. Colorado Parks and Wildlife recommends harvesting fruit promptly as it ripens, picking up fallen fruit daily, and avoiding creating attractant situations that establish habit patterns in local bear populations.

This isn’t primarily a garden design problem, but it’s worth naming here because it shapes the overall context of late summer wildlife management in Colorado Springs neighborhoods along the foothills.

The most durable solution to late-summer wildlife pressure isn’t reactive; it isn’t spray-on repellents you apply after damage has already occurred, or emergency netting deployed when you notice a plant has been browsed overnight. It’s a proactive landscape design strategy that positions your most valuable and vulnerable plants behind layers of protection that work even against a stressed, bold, midsummer deer.

This is what we call the second-line-of-defense approach: a planting strategy that uses the garden’s own composition as the primary deterrent, with physical barriers reserved for the highest-value targets rather than deployed across everything.

The core concept is straightforward. Wildlife moving into your garden from the perimeter will encounter what it encounters first: the outer layers of your planting design. If those outer layers consist of plants that smell wrong, taste wrong, or feel unpleasant, a significant percentage of wildlife will divert or give up before reaching the plants you care most about. The further inward your desirable plants are positioned, the more deterrent layers a browsing animal must navigate or evaluate before reaching them.

This doesn’t require making your entire garden unattractive. It requires thinking deliberately about which plants go where, and understanding which species provide effective wildlife deterrence while still looking beautiful in a well-designed summer garden.

The most effective first-contact deterrent plants share characteristics that make them genuinely unpalatable to most wildlife under most circumstances, including the stressed, less-selective conditions of late summer. Strongly aromatic plants are your most reliable outer-perimeter defense. Wildlife relies heavily on scent for food identification, and overwhelming aromatic compounds in plant tissue are one of the most consistent deterrents across species. The key is intensity — mild fragrance isn’t enough in late summer when desperation overrides preference. You need plants that announce their unpalatability clearly.

• Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) is close to ideal for Colorado Springs late-summer conditions. It handles our heat, drought, and intense UV beautifully, blooms in lavender-blue spires through August and into September, and produces a pungent aromatic compound in its foliage that deer find strongly deterrent. It’s one of the few plants that holds its deterrent effectiveness reliably even under high wildlife pressure.
• Lavender performs similarly, with the added benefit of peak bloom in midsummer, precisely when wildlife pressure is building. The dense aromatic oils in lavender foliage and stems persist even when the plant is stressed by heat or drought, maintaining deterrence when you need it most.
• Catmint (Nepeta) is lower-growing, spreads to fill border space effectively, blooms repeatedly through summer with deadheading, and produces an intense scent that deer consistently avoid.
• Agastache varieties, particularly those bred for western conditions, combine drought tolerance, summer-long bloom, and aromatic foliage that deer strongly dislike. Giant hyssop and its cultivars are increasingly popular in Colorado Springs landscapes precisely because they check the boxes of beauty, climate adaptability, and wildlife deterrence simultaneously.

Plants with physical deterrents provide a different kind of protection, one that doesn’t depend on the animal making an olfactory judgment but delivers an unpleasant tactile experience on contact.

• Ornamental grasses are perhaps the most underutilized wildlife deterrent in residential landscapes. Their dense clumping habit, sharp-edged blades, and silica content make them thoroughly unpalatable to deer, which avoid the physical discomfort of eating them. More importantly, large ornamental grass plantings create physical barriers that are genuinely difficult for rabbits to navigate and that deer prefer to go around rather than through. Blue avena grass, feather reed grass, and native little bluestem all perform this function while providing outstanding summer and fall visual interest.
• Barberry (Berberis), both the native species and approved cultivars, uses thorns as its primary deterrent mechanism, and it works extremely well. A dense barberry planting along a garden perimeter creates a barrier that even a determined late-summer deer will typically avoid. The brilliant fall color and winter berry interest are bonuses.
• Rugosa roses, unlike many rose varieties that deer browse readily, have thorny canes and foliage with a texture that deer dislike. They bloom prolifically and are substantially tougher to damage than hybrid tea roses.

Toxic or severely distasteful plants complete the outer-perimeter toolkit. Many ornamentals contain compounds that make them genuinely unpalatable or even harmful to wildlife, and deer, through evolutionary experience, have learned to avoid them.

• Yarrow (Achillea) contains alkaloids that deer find distinctly unpleasant, blooms in a wide color range through midsummer, tolerates Colorado’s dry conditions readily, and spreads to fill space efficiently.
• Salvia species, both ornamental salvias and native varieties like scarlet sage, are highly effective deer deterrents with long summer bloom periods that provide significant color at exactly the time of year when wildlife pressure peaks.
• Penstemon is native to the Rocky Mountain region and carries natural chemical deterrents that local wildlife has historically avoided. The native animal populations and native plant populations have co-evolved, and that evolution has produced plants that persist in the wild partly because they’re not preferred forage.

With a well-designed outer perimeter of deterrent plants, your interior planting zones can include species that would be immediately targeted without that protection. This is where you invest in the plants you care most about — the showpiece roses, the productive vegetable beds, the expensive specimen perennials — knowing they’re buffered by deterrent layers that intercept most casual wildlife forays.

The distance from the outer perimeter to interior plantings matters. Even two or three feet of deterrent planting reduces browse incidents meaningfully, because most wildlife entering a garden is making a cost-benefit evaluation with every step. A deer that encounters strong-scented Russian sage at the edge, then navigates through ornamental grasses, is making active assessments about whether the effort is worth continuing. Many animals conclude it isn’t.

For the highest-value plants in the interior zone, or for any situation where wildlife pressure is severe enough that the perimeter approach alone is insufficient, targeted physical protection remains the most reliable tool. For a thorough treatment of fencing specifications, enclosure design, and barrier options for both deer and rabbits, our earlier guide on integrated deer and rabbit prevention covers the full range of approaches. The two strategies — defensive plant design and physical barriers — work best in combination, with each compensating for the other’s limitations.

There’s one dimension of late-summer wildlife management that almost never appears in garden protection guides, but that Fredell Enterprises considers in every design we create for foothills-adjacent properties: your irrigation system‘s timing affects your wildlife pressure.

An irrigated residential landscape in the Colorado Springs foothills is a beacon to drought-stressed wildlife. The green, moisture-rich environment is visible and critically detectable by scent from significant distances. You’re not going to stop irrigating your garden to reduce wildlife pressure. But the timing of irrigation can meaningfully affect when wildlife visits occur.

Irrigation scheduled to run in the pre-dawn hours (2-5 AM) has completed its cycle before dawn, when deer activity peaks. Plants are well-watered, but the immediate visual and aromatic “freshness” of recent irrigation has diminished by the time animals are most active. Evening irrigation that runs at dusk or later creates maximum attractiveness precisely when deer are beginning their most active feeding periods.

This is a small adjustment with a meaningful impact, and it costs nothing to implement if your irrigation controller has time-of-day programming capability.

If you’re seeing wildlife damage in your Colorado Springs garden right now (in late July and August), the damage itself is useful diagnostic information about your landscape’s design vulnerabilities.

Damage concentrated at the perimeter of beds indicates that wildlife is sampling freely at the edges, which suggests either an absence of deterrent plants in those positions or deterrent plants that aren’t providing adequate coverage.

Damage distributed throughout beds, including interior plants, indicates that wildlife has established a feeding pattern and is navigating the full planting without meaningful resistance. This level of pressure typically requires physical barrier intervention alongside plant-composition adjustments.

Damage specifically on certain plant species but not others is actually encouraging; it indicates that the animals are making selections, which means appropriately positioned deterrent plants would redirect their attention.

Damage that begins suddenly in mid-to-late summer on plants that were untouched earlier in the season is classic late-summer desperation browsing, precisely the pattern this article addresses. It means your spring deterrence strategy worked but wasn’t designed to account for the shift in wildlife behavior as mountain forage declines.

The broader takeaway from the late-summer wildlife pressure pattern is that effective garden protection in Colorado Springs requires seasonal thinking, understanding that the wildlife challenge your garden faces in July is fundamentally different from the one it faced in April, and that a design addressing only one of those windows will fail during the other.

At Fredell Enterprises, we design gardens for properties along the entire foothills interface of Colorado Springs with this full-season perspective built in. We know which neighborhoods experience the heaviest late-summer wildlife pressure. We understand which plant combinations provide genuine deterrence without compromising the aesthetic quality that makes a landscape worth investing in. And we know how to layer defensive planting design with targeted physical protection to create gardens that hold up through the full arc of a Colorado summer, from the eager spring browsing of April to the desperate August forays of mountain wildlife pushed down into the city by drought.

Your garden can be beautiful and protected simultaneously. But it requires designing for the conditions that actually exist here, including the ones that arrive each July when the foothills dry out, and the wildlife comes looking for what you’ve been carefully growing all summer.

If your Colorado Springs garden is taking damage right now, or if you want to design your next planting project to be genuinely resilient through the full summer season, contact Fredell Enterprises. We’ll design a landscape that looks as good in August as it does in May and that wildlife finds considerably less appealing than your current setup.