Quercus shumardii

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 shumardii belongs to the red oak group, with the deeply lobed, bristle-tipped leaves that mark a red oak and a fall color that runs from russet through red to deep scarlet, arriving late and holding well. What sets the tree apart is temperament. Shumard oak came up out of the river bottoms but has proven almost indifferent to the site, shrugging off heavy clay, drought, road salt, and city air, and thriving in the alkaline, limestone-laced ground where pin oaks yellow and sulk.

Shumard oak grows faster than the white oaks into a broad and dignified canopy that clears sixty feet and keeps going. For a tree this adaptable, and one feeding the hundreds of moth and butterfly species that an oak supports, it is far less common in the trade than such a tree deserves.

Shumard oak is the oak to reach for when you want red-oak color and a tree that will forgive almost anything: a fast shade or street tree for a lawn, a park, a campus, a parking island, or a difficult urban or alkaline site where fussier oaks decline. Give full sun and room for a broad, sixty- to seventy-five-foot crown, and pair with other tough natives. The late scarlet fall color, the strong branching, and the wildlife-feeding acorns round out one of the most adaptable and underused of the red oaks.