Is Butterfly Weed Deer Resistant?

Updated September 2026 · Garden Advice Guide

Yes. Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) is one of the most dependable deer resistant perennials you can put in a sunny bed, and Rutgers NJAES places it in the top "rarely damaged" tier of its landscape ratings. The reason is chemistry: milkweeds carry cardenolides, bitter compounds that upset a browsing animal's heart rhythm and stomach. A deer needs exactly one bad mouthful to learn the lesson, and deer remember plants.

Butterfly weed is hardy from zone 3 to zone 9. Check your zone free with our Growing Zone Lookup, then use the tables below to pick the milkweed that fits your soil.

Updated September 2026

The catch with butterfly weed has nothing to do with deer. It is a slow, taprooted plant that hates being moved, emerges so late in spring that people dig it up thinking it died, and sulks in rich, wet soil. Get those three things right and you have a plant that lives for a decade, feeds monarchs, and gets ignored by every deer that walks past it.

Why deer leave butterfly weed alone

Deer browse with their noses first and their memory second. Butterfly weed fails both tests, for three separate reasons.

1. Cardenolides. Every plant in the Asclepias genus makes cardiac glycosides. These are the same class of compounds that let monarch caterpillars turn themselves toxic to birds. In a mammal they cause nausea, drooling, and an irregular heartbeat. Deer are large enough that a nibble will not kill them, which is exactly why the deterrent works so well: the animal gets sick, recovers, and permanently associates that shape and smell with feeling terrible.

2. Bitter, hairy foliage. Butterfly weed is the odd one out in its own family. Where common milkweed bleeds thick white latex the moment you snap a leaf, A. tuberosa has thin, watery sap and a lower cardenolide load than its cousins. What it has instead is coarse, hairy, alternate leaves on stiff stems. Deer prefer thin-walled, water-rich foliage: hosta, daylily, tulip, and impatiens are the classics because they are essentially salad. Butterfly weed is closer to chewing a dry weed.

3. It grows where deer are not browsing. Butterfly weed wants full sun, sharp drainage, and lean soil. That puts it on hot slopes, gravel edges, meadow strips, and hell strips, not in the shady, moist transition zones where deer do most of their comfortable feeding. Placement is part of the resistance.

Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station publishes Landscape Plants Rated by Deer Resistance, the scale most nursery tags borrow from. Its top grade is "rarely damaged," and that is where the milkweeds sit. Read the wording carefully, though. The scale never says deer proof, because no plant is.

Is butterfly weed deer resistant under heavy pressure?

Mostly yes, and the exceptions are narrow enough to plan around.

The first three weeks after planting. Nursery butterfly weed has been grown under shade cloth, watered daily, and pushed with fertilizer. Its foliage is softer and its chemistry weaker than a plant that has spent a summer in full sun. Fresh transplants also sit in disturbed, fertilizer-scented soil, which draws deer in to investigate. Spray a repellent on planting day and again two weeks later, then stop.

A drought year when nothing else is green. Deer under genuine food stress eat things they ignored for years. Butterfly weed is drought tough and stays green when the lawn is brown, which makes it one of the few green things left in a bad August. Even then, expect a test bite rather than a stripped plant.

Very young spring shoots, rarely. Butterfly weed emerges late, often four to six weeks after everything around it. Those first purple-tinged shoots are soft. In a yard with a resident herd and nothing else to eat in May, they occasionally get clipped. The plant regrows from the taproot.

What essentially never happens is a deer eating an established butterfly weed clump to the ground. If yours is being flattened, look at the cut. Rabbits leave a clean 45 degree snip within about 18 inches of the ground. Deer have no upper front teeth, so they tear, and the stub is ragged. Rabbits also mostly avoid milkweed, so a chewed-off butterfly weed is more often a groundhog or a vole problem than a deer one.

Butterfly weed and butterfly bush are not the same plant

This trips up more shoppers than any other point on the page, and the deer answer is different for each.

If a nursery tag says "butterfly bush" and you wanted the orange native perennial, you have the wrong plant. Butterfly bush feeds adult butterflies and nothing else. Butterfly weed feeds the caterpillars, which is the part that actually builds a monarch population. Our guide to how to attract pollinators covers why host plants matter more than nectar plants.

Milkweed species compared: zones, soil, and height

Deer resistance is effectively equal across the genus, so choose on soil and size instead. This is the table worth saving before you order seed.

How to read that table. Butterfly weed is the dry-soil specialist. If your bed is heavy clay that stays damp, swamp milkweed is the plant that will actually live, and it is just as deer resistant. If you have a woodland edge with real shade, poke milkweed or purple milkweed are the two that tolerate it. Common milkweed spreads aggressively by underground runners, so keep it out of a tidy border and put it in a meadow strip.

Butterfly weed cultivars are all A. tuberosa and all equally unappetizing to deer. 'Hello Yellow' is clear yellow, 'Gay Butterflies' is a seed mix of orange, red, and yellow, and 'Blonde Bombshell' is a cream-yellow selection. Straight species orange is the toughest and the cheapest from seed.

Worked example: a 20-foot deer-pressured sunny strip

Say you have a 20-foot strip along a driveway, full sun, sandy soil that bakes, and deer that walk it every night on their way to the neighbor's hostas. Here is how the planting math works.

Step 1: spacing and counts. Butterfly weed matures at 12 to 18 inches wide. Plant on 18-inch centers.

• 20 ft = 240 inches, divided by 18 inches = 13 butterfly weed plants for a single row.
• For a fuller two-row look, stagger a second row 14 inches behind the first: 13 + 12 = 25 plants total.

Step 2: add scent, not just toxicity. A deer will walk beside a toxic plant it ignores and eat something next to it. Mixing in aromatic perennials makes the whole strip read as wrong. Add 7 catmint on 24-inch centers along the front edge and 5 Russian sage at the back. Now every plant in the strip is either bitter or strongly scented.

Step 3: the timing that matters. Sow or plant in spring after your last frost. Butterfly weed grown from seed usually skips bloom in year one, flowers lightly in year two, and hits full size in year three. Nursery plants bloom the first summer but establish more slowly than you would expect, because the taproot has to rebuild.

Step 4: mark the crowns. Push a bamboo stake beside each plant in fall. Butterfly weed does not emerge until soil is genuinely warm, which in zone 6 means late May, weeks after the tulips and daylilies. Every year, somebody digs up a perfectly healthy patch in April assuming it is dead. The stakes cost nothing and save the planting.

Step 5: what you avoid. A 20-foot run of hosta or daylily in that same strip gets browsed to nubs by mid-June in a deer yard, and it gets replaced. This planting gets ignored, blooms for six to eight weeks, and comes back for a decade from the same roots. Use our plant spacing calculator to run the same math for a different bed size.

How to grow butterfly weed so it survives you

Butterfly weed is easy once established and fussy for exactly one season. Nearly all failures trace to the same four mistakes.

Full sun, six hours minimum. Shade produces floppy stems, few flowers, and plants that rot over winter. This is a prairie and roadside plant.

Lean, sharply drained soil. Do not amend the hole with compost, do not add fertilizer, and do not plant it in the irrigated part of the bed. Wet winter soil kills more butterfly weed than cold ever does. If your soil is heavy, plant on a slight mound or switch to swamp milkweed. Our guide to testing garden soil shows how to check drainage before you buy plants.

Do not move it, and do not divide it. Butterfly weed grows a deep, carrot-like taproot. A three-year-old plant can have a root 12 to 18 inches down. Cutting that root usually kills the plant. Choose the spot once. If you must transplant, do it in early spring the moment the shoots break ground, and dig deeper than feels reasonable.

Water the first summer, then stop. A first-year plant needs a deep soak weekly through its first July and August. After that, butterfly weed handles drought better than almost anything in a perennial bed, and regular irrigation shortens its life. Our watering guide explains how to tell a thirsty plant from a drowning one.

Starting from seed. Butterfly weed seed needs 30 days of cold, moist conditions before it will germinate reliably. The easy method is winter sowing: sow in a milk jug in December or January and let the weather do the work. Our winter sowing guide has the full jug method. Direct fall sowing into prepared ground works too, and skipping the transplant step suits a taprooted plant perfectly.

Cut it back in late winter, not fall. The hollow stems shelter overwintering insects and the seed pods feed birds. Cut to 4 inches in March. Our fall garden cleanup guide covers which perennials to leave standing.

What actually damages butterfly weed, if not deer

Oleander aphids. Bright yellow-orange aphids that coat the stems in clusters by midsummer. They look alarming and rarely kill the plant. Blast them off with a hose, or squash them by hand. Skip the insecticide entirely, because the same spray kills monarch eggs and caterpillars sitting on the same stems. Our guide to getting rid of aphids covers the non-toxic methods.

Crown rot in wet winter soil. The single most common killer. Plants vanish over winter in clay or in an irrigated bed. Sharp drainage is the fix, and it is the only fix.

Being dug up in spring. Not a joke. Late emergence plus an unmarked crown equals an accidental removal every year.

Monarch caterpillars. They can strip a plant, and that is the point of growing it. A defoliated butterfly weed in August almost always releafs. Plant three to five instead of one so the population has somewhere to spread.

Transplant shock. Nursery pots that spiraled the taproot rarely thrive. Buy the smallest pot available or grow from seed, which gives you a straight root from the start.

Companion plants that share its conditions

Everything below wants full sun and dry to average soil, blooms in the same window, and is also strongly deer resistant. Planted together, they make a bed that smells and tastes wrong from every angle.

What butterfly weed will not do

Honesty section, because deer resistant plants get oversold.

It will not protect its neighbors. The toxicity works on the plant itself. A deer will stand next to a butterfly weed clump and eat a daylily without hesitating. See plants deer love for the list that genuinely needs a fence.

It is not a substitute for a fence. A hungry deer with a vegetable garden on the other side steps right over a 2-foot perennial. Butterfly weed is one layer in a plan.

It will not bloom the first year from seed. Expect leaves in year one, a few flowers in year two, and a real display in year three. Nursery plants shortcut this, but they still need a season to settle.

It will not thrive in a rich, watered border. If your bed is amended, mulched deep, and irrigated twice a week, butterfly weed will grow leggy and die out in two winters. Match the plant to the site.

For the wider defense plan, including fence heights that actually stop deer and a repellent rotation that keeps working, see our pillar guide to deer resistant plants and the companion list of deer resistant perennials.

FAQ

Do deer eat butterfly weed?

Very rarely. Butterfly weed carries cardenolides, bitter compounds that make a deer sick after a single mouthful, and deer avoid plants that once made them ill. Expect an occasional test bite on brand new transplants or on soft spring shoots in a drought year. An established clump in a normal season is almost never browsed.

Is butterfly weed deer proof?

No plant is deer proof, and the Rutgers scale caps out at "rarely damaged" for exactly that reason. Butterfly weed sits in that top tier, which in practice means you should expect zero damage most seasons and a nibble in a hard one. Treat it as one of the best bets available, not a guarantee.

Is all milkweed deer resistant?

Yes, across the genus. Common milkweed, swamp milkweed, showy milkweed, whorled milkweed, and butterfly weed all carry cardiac glycosides, and deer avoid all of them. Pick the species by soil and size instead of by deer resistance: butterfly weed for dry soil, swamp milkweed for damp, whorled milkweed for thin poor ground.

Do rabbits eat butterfly weed?

Rarely, and for the same reason deer skip it. The bitter sap deters rabbits as effectively as it deters deer. If something is snipping stems cleanly a few inches off the ground, check for groundhogs, which are less discriminating, or voles chewing the taproot from below.

Why has my butterfly weed not come up yet?

It emerges late, on purpose. Butterfly weed waits for genuinely warm soil, which usually means four to six weeks after your daylilies and tulips are already up. In zone 6 that is late May. Mark the crown with a stake in fall so nobody digs it up in April, and give it until June before you write it off.

Can I move an established butterfly weed?

You can try, but the odds are against you. The taproot on a three-year-old plant runs 12 to 18 inches deep and does not regrow well from a cut end. If you must, move it in early spring the moment shoots appear, dig a much deeper hole than feels sensible, and keep as much root as you can. Starting a new one from seed is usually easier.

Will butterfly weed keep deer out of my garden?

Not by itself. It defends its own space very well, and a continuous edge of bitter and aromatic plants along the side deer approach from does reduce how often they step into the bed behind it. It creates no protective bubble at a distance. Use it as one layer alongside fencing or a rotating repellent if you are growing things deer genuinely want.

Is butterfly weed toxic to pets?

Yes, mildly. The same cardenolides that deter deer can cause vomiting, drooling, and irregular heart rhythm in dogs, cats, and livestock if eaten in quantity. Animals almost never eat enough because it tastes terrible, but it is worth knowing before you plant it in a paddock or a dog run.