Start with the honest definition, because the labels oversell. Deer-resistant means deer eat it last. It does not mean they will not eat it. A deer in February, on a hard winter, with the benches grazed down, will eat a great many things the book says it will not — and a newly planted shrub with soft nursery growth on it is a more appealing meal than the same plant will be in five years.
Pressure also varies enormously inside a few miles. A property backing onto open ground, a bench edge, or a drainage corridor gets hit in a way a house in the middle of town simply does not. The same plant list succeeds on one street and gets stripped on the next.
These are the wildlife traits we sort by, and what each one is actually worth.
Rabbits are the more serious problem and they get less attention. Deer browse the top and disfigure a plant. Rabbits work at snow line in winter and girdle bark — a complete ring chewed off the trunk — and a girdled plant does not recover. It leafs out in spring on stored energy, looks fine into June, and then dies. Young trees with smooth bark are the usual casualty, and the damage happens under snow where nobody sees it until it is done.
The other direction is attraction, which comes down to food and cover. Fruit, seed and dense branching bring birds in. Worth knowing that this pulls against low maintenance — fruit ripens, drops, and stains what it lands on, which is a feature in a border and a nuisance over a patio or a parking area.
There is no plant list that makes a yard deer-proof, and anyone who says otherwise has not worked through a hard February here. What a good list does is shift the odds far enough that a planting gets established, and once it is established most of it stops being worth a deer's attention. The first two winters are the ones that matter, and they are the cheapest to protect.
If you have lost plantings to browse before, tell us what and where. That history describes your property rather than an average one, and it is better information than any resistance rating in any catalog.
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