Mountain Mahogany

        By Gene Gade 

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You don't have to be particularly observant to note the abrupt change in vegetation type between the grassy place where I'm standing and the shrub thicket a few meters away, but you might be interested in why is that way or in what it's got to do with life in southern wyoming.

The shrub we're looking at is called "true Mountain Mahogany and it's found in many places here in southern Wyoming and in the Black Hills: It has A close relative, the curl-leaf mountain mahogany that lives farther north and west

Both species of mountain mahogany are heavily browsed by deer in the winter and are an important part of the diet

The more heavily the shrubs are used by deer, the more spines they produce to protect themselves.

Mountain mahogany thrives on shallow, poorly developed soils that are usually high in calcium -- It grows almost on bedrock here in the plains and in the foothills up to about 7,500 foot elevations.

one of the advantages mountain mahogany has on these tough sites is that they produce their own supply of nitrogen - Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for all plants, but most of them can't manufacture the form of nitrogen fertilizer that they need

So, when Mountain Mahogany stays were it is now, it has a sort of home field advantage. However, when the shrubs venture out on to the deeper soils, they are subjected to strong competition from the grasses for water and nutrients and to more frequent wildfires

Mountain mahogany is just one of the hundreds of tough critters that make Wyoming interesting. I'm Gene Gade of the university of Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service.