Although deer (Odocoileus species) can be entertaining to watch, they can also cause considerable damage to our landscape and garden plants. As the diets of these animals change with wild food availability, yearly precipitation and temperature variations, it can be difficult to predict which plants will be appealing for consumption. Additionally, plants may be more desirable when they are young and/or well fertilized. Due to this variability, instead of creating a straightforward list of plants in which herbivory is described in a “yes” or “no” fashion, a survey of both the existing literature on the subject and first-hand community experience was conducted. The results from that survey are presented in this publication as a percentage of those responses, which may be used to infer probability of herbivory.
Also of note is that while the local data collected is focused on rocky mountain mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and desert mule deer (O. eremicus), sources from outside of the intermountain west may be referring to white-tailed deer (O. virginianus).
While there are some products and home remedies that purport to repel and/or discourage deer, due to the fact that herbivory can be so variable year to year, the only way to ensure that plants are protected from herbivory is to exclude them from the area with a properly designed fence or other barrier. Read az1855 for information on fencing design.
Data were collected from multiple sources (websites, social media and surveys), many of which also reported data from their own sources, though only tallied as a single response.The goal was to obtain herbivory data from previous research on elk and from Arizona residents and businesses with direct experience with the animals. “n” represents the number of data sources (see sources) who provided input; the larger the n value, generally the greater our confidence in the reported probability of damage, though as stated earlier, a single source could be an aggregate of several. Because animal behavior can vary based on several variables such as temperature and rainfall, these plant data have been categorized as “never to rarely damaged”, “sometimes damaged” or “frequently damaged”, with percentages based on the number of responses/sources for each plant.
Check out the whole Arizona Highlands Plant Herbovory series for the full range of resistant plants.