Is Gambel Oak deer resistant?

A clump oak more often than a tree. It grows as dense clonal patches three to twenty feet tall, and only on a good enough site does it make the fifty foot specimen the books allow for. Deer and elk browse it — in Utah it counts as a major forage species — so the rating means it carries the damage rather than that it goes untouched.

The thing people get wrong is expecting a garden tree. It is very slow growing and it suckers from a lignotuber, with rhizomes running between the stems, so one planted oak becomes a thicket unless you take the suckers off while it is young. Root grafting between clones is common, which is why a patch behaves as a single organism.

Rocky ground suits it, acid or calcareous, sand through clay, in part shade. Cold is not the constraint. Patience is.