Quercus incana

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.

Quercus incana is another oak of the longleaf sandhills, the dry, open, fire-run uplands from the Carolinas to Texas, where the tree grows alongside turkey oak and the pines on the poorest, driest sand in the South. The leaves are narrow and lance-shaped and untoothed, blue-gray above and nearly white-felted beneath, and the new growth opens a soft rose in spring before cooling to that signature gray.

Bluejack oaks make a small, often gnarled, characterful tree rather than a shade tree, at home in the same hard ground as the longleaf, on which our journal has a piece worth your time. In that fire-run country the acorns are a reliable mast for deer, turkey, and jays on ground that grows little else, and the low, twisting form is part of the sandhill's particular beauty.

Plant bluejack oak in deep sand and full sun for the one thing few oaks offer: a canopy that reads blue. Use the tree as a small, sculptural specimen in a dry native or xeric garden, a sandhill restoration, or a hot, sunny bank where thirstier trees fail, and pair with wiregrass, turkey oak, and other longleaf-sandhill natives. Give sharp drainage and let the characterful, gnarled frame develop with almost no intervention.