Where blunt mountain mint is all broad silver, Pycnanthemum tenuifolium is the slender cousin, a fine-textured native built from wiry stems and narrow, almost needle-thin leaves. From midsummer into early fall the plant clouds over with flat-topped clusters of tiny white to pale lavender flowers, faintly purple-speckled, and the effect at a distance is a low haze of bloom. What the flowers lack in size they make up in draw: bees, small butterflies, wasps, and beneficial insects work the nectar in numbers that make narrowleaf mountain mint one of the most valuable pollinator plants of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
digestive health, general wellness, topical applications
Quercus acerifolia is one of the rarest oaks in North America, and one of the most quietly beautiful. The name says the first thing you notice: acerifolia means maple-leaved, and the upper leaves really do look like a sugar maple's, often as wide as they are long, cut into three to five sharp, glossy lobes that turn deep red and burgundy in fall. A close relative of the Shumard oak, maple-leaf oak grows as anything from a stunted, multi-trunked shrub on a windswept ridge to a single-trunked tree of forty or fifty feet in cultivation.
Quercus agrifolia, the coast live oak, is the evergreen oak of the California coast, the gnarled, dark-canopied tree that shades the golden hills of Steinbeck country and spreads heavy limbs over ranchland and canyon. The holly-like leaves are small, thick, and leathery, glossy dark green above with a spiny-toothed edge, and the tree holds them year round, casting the deep, cool shade that is the plant's signature. Left room, coast live oak builds a broad, low, romantically crooked crown.
Quercus alba, the white oak, is the grandfather of the eastern forest, a slow, massive, long-lived tree that can stand for centuries and outlast the people who plant them. The most famous of all was the Wye Oak of Wye Mills, Maryland, a single white oak that stood for more than four hundred and sixty years and served as Maryland's state tree until a storm brought the giant down in 2002. The broad, rounded crown, the pale, scaly, ash-gray bark, and the deeply lobed, blue-green leaves are the picture most people carry of an oak.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
50–80 ft.
Spread
50–80 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
These are the grandchildren of a legend. The Wye Oak of Wye Mills, Maryland, was the greatest white oak in the country, a single tree that stood more than four hundred and sixty years and served as Maryland's state tree until a storm finally brought the giant down in 2002. Quercus alba 'Grandchildren of Wye Oak' are seedling-grown descendants of that famous tree, carrying the bloodline of an American icon into gardens that have room for the long view.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
60–80 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
This oak is named for a doctor who loved plants more than medicine. Alvan Wentworth Chapman practiced in Apalachicola, on the Florida panhandle, and botanized the Gulf coast so thoroughly that his Flora of the Southern United States, published in 1860, stood for decades as the book on the region's plants; this scrub oak carries his name in thanks.
The name is a promise the tree keeps only at the very end of the year. Coccinea is Latin for scarlet, and scarlet oak earns it in late October, well after the other oaks have turned and dropped, when the whole crown ignites into a clean, carrying red that holds for weeks and can be seen across a valley. On a good tree in the right soil, this is the best fall color the genus offers, which is saying something.
This is one of William Bartram's oaks. He came upon the tree on his travels through the southeastern backcountry in the 1770s, and the botanical name still carries his hand, Quercus hemisphaerica Bartram ex Willd., the species epithet meaning half-a-globe, for the little domed cap that sits like a skullcap on the acorn.
The name is the whole description: incana means hoary, gray-haired, and bluejack oak wears a coat of fine pale hairs that turns the foliage a soft blue-gray, almost silver in some lights, unusual in a genus that mostly trades in greens.
Turkey oak earns the name from the leaf, three-lobed and clawed and splayed exactly like the track a wild turkey leaves in sand, which is fitting, because sand is where these trees live. Quercus laevis is the signature oak of the deep sandhills, the droughty white-sand ridges of the longleaf country from the Carolinas to the Gulf, ground so poor and so hot that most trees simply decline the invitation.
The overcup oak is named for a small piece of botanical theater: an acorn so nearly swallowed by its cup that only the tip shows, sealed up as if against the floodwaters the tree was born to. Quercus lyrata is a creature of the southern bottomlands, the broad floodplains and backswamps from the Mississippi Delta to the Carolina river bottoms, standing through the cycles of flood and drawdown that drown lesser trees.
This oak is named for a woman the botanist married. William Willard Ashe, the tireless North Carolina forester who described hundreds of southern trees, set the species down as Quercus margaretta in honor of Margaret Henry Wilcox, whom he would wed in 1905; few oaks carry so personal a dedication.
Quercus michauxii is a big, generous bottomland oak that borrows the best of two better-known relatives: the pale, flaky, handsome bark of the white oak, and the large, coarsely toothed, chestnut-shaped leaves of the chestnut oak. The result is one of the noblest of the Southern hardwoods. In Coker and Totten's Trees of the Southeastern States, a 1931 letter from James Henry Rice, Jr. of Colleton County, South Carolina, put it plainly: "It is a noble and beautiful tree and might be termed majestic with no violence to the language."
This oak carries the name of a Pennsylvania parson. Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg was a Lutheran minister who botanized on the side, thoroughly enough that the German-American botanist George Engelmann named the species for him, and then misspelled it: Engelmann set an umlaut over the u that Muhlenberg never used, and the rules of botanical naming have fossilized the slip ever since, transliterating it into the tongue-twisting muehlenbergii we are stuck with.
Myrtle oak takes the name from the leaf, small and leathery and rolled at the edges like a true myrtle, which is about as far from the broad, lobed oak of the schoolbook as the genus travels. Quercus myrtifolia is a creature of the Florida scrub and the sand-pine ridges along the southeastern coast, the bright, fast-draining places where the salt comes in on the wind and the soil is mostly quartz.
Few oaks in North America are rarer. Quercus oglethorpensis went unnoticed by science until 1940, when the botanist Wilbur Duncan described the tree from material gathered in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, and gave the species the county's name. Even now Oglethorpe oak is known from only a scattering of stands across the Georgia and South Carolina Piedmont, with far-flung outliers in Louisiana and Mississippi, and the species sits on every serious list of oaks of conservation concern.
The first surprise of Quercus phellos is that nobody believes they're an oak. The leaves are narrow and untoothed, willow-like, finer than an oak has any right to be, and they turn soft yellow before they fall; only the acorns, small and round and produced by the thousand, give the game away.
There is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all of which makes the enduring courtesy of the name faintly delicious. The tree has outlasted the quarrel.
Quercus stellata, the post oak, is one of the great toughs of the eastern white oaks, a tree born to dry uplands, old fields, and rocky ridges from the sandy hills of the Carolinas and Georgia across the Piedmont and into the prairies of Texas and the Midwest. Where soils are thin and the summers unrelenting, post oak has made a living, holding ground against wind, sun, and time itself.
Nuttall oak is named for Thomas Nuttall, the restless English-American naturalist who botanized the young United States more thoroughly than almost anyone of his generation. Long known as Quercus nuttallii, the tree now carries the name Quercus texana in most botanical usage, a change that has caused no end of confusion, since the name once belonged to a different oak. Whatever the label, this is a large deciduous red oak of the Southern bottomlands, at home in the floodplain forests of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley.
