Semmering said:As I parted from home I surrounded that particular lily with twigs of last year´s thyme. They are dead but still very aromatic. A bit naive perhaps, but I thought the perfume would keep animals away

There is a common recommendation to plant smelly plants (green onions, garlic, mint, etc) around things you want to protect as the strong smell makes it hard for animals to smell the presence of predators so they would avoid the area. Other less natural options include spraying a mix that has rotten eggs in it or hanging bars of soap that have a strong smell in the area. I have not had luck with any of these recommendations. Some have had success using a product call milorganite but I have not tried it.

auratum said:

There is a common recommendation to plant smelly plants (green onions, garlic, mint, etc) around things you want to protect as the strong smell makes it hard for animals to smell the presence of predators so they would avoid the area. Other less natural options include spraying a mix that has rotten eggs in it or hanging bars of soap that have a strong smell in the area. I have not had luck with any of these recommendations. Some have had success using a product call milorganite but I have not tried it.

Okay, some of those are eew....

Garlic didn't help me at all but I sure got a lot of garlic out there now! I actually pulled it all up last fall (or did I?) but dang, it just keeps on growing!

I am having a lot of luck with daffodils though! At least so far....

I bought a bunch of small alliums and planted them everywhere - didn't slow the rabbits down that I could tell. Best luck was getting a couple of barn cats - they keep all the critters in check. I don't have deer issues due to being in the city/populated area.

Spring garlic greens are yummy (to people!). Some had escaped into my shrub bed that borders my garden, years ago. They usually don't grow bulbs worth digging, but the gralic greens in salads, stews, etc. are wonderful. Here is my little "garlic meadow" completely untended in the wood mulch. {Lilies are in the background.) Actually, last year I removed about half of the bulbs since they seemed to be too crowded. I've only eaten about a third of the crop so far. As you might expect, the leaves are pungent when raw, but mellow if cooked.

Thanks for good input!

It´s still a mystery to me though, what actually works. So far I have tried lavender as a kind of aromatic shield and it offered no protection. Now I´ll see if mint works better. Since the mint plants are so invasive I keep them in pots, so it´s easy to move them around and see if or where they make a difference.

In my experience alliums are good against voles - or anything, I guess, attacking from underground. The bulbs really stink, I´m sure you know! As for rabbits, like Patrick, I rely on cats. In day light there´s a whole gang of them hunting out here and at night time the garden is patrolled by foxes.

But if I were to plant something smelly around the lilies, wouldn´t there be interference with the roots? I want the soil around the lilies to remain as porous as possible, so that any offsprings (stem bulbs etc) find their way through...?

The more stuff you grow in soil, as opposed to leaving it barren, the better the soil health becomes. This includes lowering summer soil temperature, improving soil structure and tilth, more of the beneficial soil organisms and greater porosity. But yes, there might be some root competition between the alliums and lilies, and your lilies might multiply less vigorously. (Or, the lilies might actually do better, because of the aforementioned.)

But what good is a fast growing lily if you never see the flowers because they get eaten by rabbits?

Good points about the soil, thanks. Would thyme be a good combination with lilies? I´m searching for something "smelly" but with rather superficious roots. The plant shouldn´t be too invasive but easy to remove if needed.

I know some people plant annuals with their lilies. The roots usually stay shallow or at least die out every year. I'm not sure if any annuals would deter any varmints though.

I think thyme would work great. It might be fun to plant different kinds, with different leaf sizes and textures, bloom times and bloom colors.

I've heard marigolds are good for keeping chipmunks out of mixed gardens. They say leave the plants in the ground during fall cleanup for winter protection even. I always have a few marigolds growing here and there but I couldn't say if they helped one way or the other.

Roosterlorn said:I've heard marigolds are good for keeping chipmunks out of mixed gardens. They say leave the plants in the ground during fall cleanup for winter protection even. I always have a few marigolds growing here and there but I couldn't say if they helped one way or the other.

My chipmunks LOVED my marigolds! They actually lived underneath an area fully planted with them.

Roosterlorn said:I've heard marigolds are good for keeping chipmunks out of mixed gardens.

Only if you can find some of the old varieties. They are the only ones that still smell enough.......
Rabbits will even eat marigold nowadays!

vicous rabbits. Maybe I should grow carrots, and lettuce?

Nhra_20 said:vicous rabbits. Maybe I should grow carrots, and lettuce?

THAT'll keep the rabbits out....of your neighbor's garden....

Sorry for late reply! I was away from my garden for a few days and when I returned on Saturday some unknown nightly visitor had taken one of the lavender plants guardening my lily, removing the lavender totally and leaving not a single root in the soil. The lily itself was untouched

On the lily I checked the spots which Joanna wisely identified as dirt and 90 percent of them were gone, washed away probably by the first rain in a few weeks. The remaining spots all fell off, like dust, when I examined them closer...

I´ll look now for something "stronger" than lavender. And I had this idea I might try fresh ginger, since I already use a lot of it for cooking. Has anyone tried it? From the reactions of our cat the smell of ginger seems highly repellent. To avoid disturbing the soil too much I thought of putting it on top of other mulch.

@Semmering, I don't know if this will be helpful to you right now, but go to any online gardening store that has filters for displaying plants and select your zone and Rabbit Resistant and Deer Resistant, and any other things you want. This will give you a list of plants that rabbits and deer don't like. Then you can buy them anywhere (some online resources are very good) and plant them around your lilies. Obviously, you can't plant daffodils now, but you can in the fall. There are many other beautiful plants that can be helpful too.

Good luck, and please let us know how it goes with your ginger! I like the way you think.

Joanna, I followed your kind advice and looked online for rabbit-proof perennials. To my surprise I found colombines.
As I took over this garden three years ago the old owners already had plantes lilies and colombines side by side. All this time I´ve been thinking they did it because they look great together, blue colombines with orange L. bulbiferum, white and pink columbines with purple martagons.



After learning they are rabbit-prooof, I now suspect the colombines were planted here as a defence line! The old owners aren´t around anymore and there´s no one to ask. But it´s an interesting experience, slowly beginning to understand how people in the past had exactly the same problems and how often they knew by heart, perhaps as a family tradition, techniques I have to learn online...

Anyway, the attacks I´ve had so far (rabbits and deer) were where I had just a few odd lilies and no colombines. So it might work. But the rest of my family is not as fond of colombines as I am, so I´ll have to stick to the ginger method...

LOL, they probably thought, "Oh! Look what she put out for us to eat!"

So....newbie(ish) question!

My understanding (from unknown origin so I could just be making it up) is that LAs are usually LAAs, is this correct?

That is my understanding also. I managed to find a paper on more complex crosses a while ago and noted my conclusions in this post: https://garden.org/thread/view...