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
Quercus arizonica is the heavy, pale-barked white oak of the Madrean Sky Islands, the ranges that lift out of the desert in southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, west Texas, and northern Mexico. Growth is slow and the frame is broad: stout limbs, an irregularly spreading crown, and in time a trunk three feet through on a tree capable of sixty feet where the site allows, though garden specimens usually settle nearer thirty. The leaves give the species away, thick and stiff as harness leather, blue-green above and conspicuously pale and felted beneath, holding through most winters and dropping only as new growth pushes in spring. Old bark goes ashy white and deeply furrowed, which is where the common name comes from.
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.
Sand live oak is the live oak of the sandhills, a tough, evergreen cousin of the great Southern live oak scaled for drier, leaner ground. Where Quercus virginiana spreads into a vast shade tree, this species usually stays a small tree or even a shrub, dark and dense and salt-proof, holding leathery evergreen leaves through the year on the deep, dry sands of the coastal plain.
Georgia oak is a rarity in every sense, a small, refined red oak so restricted in the wild that most people have never seen one. The species clings to the granite outcrops of west-central Georgia and central Alabama, the flatrock country around Stone Mountain, where thin soil keeps the plant stunted and shrubby; give the same tree good ground and it grows into a shapely small tree of fifteen to thirty feet, clothed in small, glossy, bristle-tipped leaves that turn red and burgundy in fall.
Schlechtendal and Chamisso published this oak in 1830 from material gathered around Jalapa, in Veracruz, and the epithet they settled on, germana, is the Latin word for genuine, true, of the same stock. Neither botanist left a note explaining the choice. The common names have been more generous since: royal oak, encino roble, and best of all avocado-leaf oak, for foliage so long, leathery, and lustrous that the leaves could pass for those of a Persea. In the cloud forests where both trees grow, the resemblance is more than a coincidence of shape; the two share the same wet, mild, dripping world.
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.
Bear oak is the scrub oak of the barrens, a tough, thicket-forming little oak that thrives exactly where good trees give up. Many-branched and gnarled, usually a shrub or small tree well under twenty feet, the species clothes dry ridgetops, sandplains, and pine barrens across the Northeast, reaching south sparingly into the Carolinas, the small glossy leaves silvered beneath and the branches heavy in a good year with small, bitter acorns.
Shingle oak is the oak that fools people, an oak with no lobes at all. The glossy, dark green leaves are long, entire, and laurel-like, closer to a rhododendron or a bay than to the deep-cut foliage of most oaks, and only the single bristle at each leaf tip gives the family away. A medium to large deciduous tree of forty to sixty feet, neat and pyramidal when young and rounding with age, the tree brings a clean, distinctive texture that few other shade trees can match.
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.
The cup gives them away. Most oaks set their acorns in a cup of overlapping scales, but Quercus myrsinifolia belongs to the ring-cupped oaks of East Asia, the Cyclobalanopsis, whose acorn sits in a cup banded with smooth concentric rings like a tiny stacked beehive.
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.
