Is Common Hackberry deer resistant?

Around fifty feet is what you should plan for, though it will go to a hundred on a good site, so this is a tree for a plot with room in it. The older bark is the giveaway — conspicuous corky projections all over it, quite unlike the smooth gray of a young trunk.

The rating needs qualifying at the small end. A mature hackberry is out of reach and untroubled, but deer browse young ones hard: thirty percent of available twigs were taken in one Illinois study, and at Manassas, where deer ran to roughly 42 per square kilometre, seedlings survived better inside protected plots than outside them. Plant a decent-sized tree, cage it for three or four years, and the problem goes away for good.

The two things people worry about are both cosmetic. Mites and fungi deform twigs into witches'-brooms, and jumping plant lice raise rounded galls across the leaves; neither shortens the tree's life. It is a larval host for mourning cloak, question mark, American snout and tawny emperor butterflies.