Is Curl-Leaf Mountain Mahogany deer resistant?

Take this rating carefully. The leaves are handsome — small, leathery, curled at the margins, dark green above and silver beneath, evergreen and slightly resinous — but this is not a plant deer ignore. One source calls it the most palatable browse on mule deer range, and they take the evergreen foliage year-round.

That is also the failure mode. Where use is heavy the animals eat everything they can reach, and the plants end up hedged into basketball and umbrella shapes; browsed shrubs have been recorded at three to four feet after sixty or seventy years. A garden specimen put in small and left unprotected will simply never make a tree. Fence it until the canopy is clear of browse height, then forget about it.

Two things follow from how slowly it grows. It may not reach full height until a hundred years of age, so buy the biggest plant you can find. And it is usually killed outright by fire and sprouts only weakly — prune it lightly, and never into old wood.