{"title":"Oaks","description":"\u003cp\u003eOaks are the great, long-lived trees of the genus \u003cem\u003eQuercus\u003c\/em\u003e, the defining hardwoods of much of North America. The genus is vast and varied: towering deciduous shade trees and broad live oaks that hold their leaves through winter, fast growers and slow, uplanders and bottomland dwellers, all sharing the acorn and a reputation for strength and permanence. Given room, an oak becomes the tree a whole landscape is built around, and the one a family measures its years by.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the landscape an oak is the ultimate specimen and shade tree. A single one cools a house and a lawn, frames a view, and gives a garden a sense of age no younger planting can. The evergreen live oaks make sweeping, architectural forms; the deciduous kinds bring autumn color and a fine winter silhouette. These are trees to site with real care, for a lifetime and beyond.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe grow oaks because they are, quite simply, the most valuable plants most people can put in the ground. Oaks support more kinds of wildlife than any other tree in North America, hosting hundreds of species of caterpillars that feed nesting birds, and their acorns carry deer, turkey, and countless smaller creatures through winter. To plant an oak is to plant the foundation of a food web.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive an oak full sun and room for a mature crown, get the roots established early, and choose the species to suit the soil and the site. Most are also \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/southeast-natives\"\u003eSoutheastern Natives\u003c\/a\u003e; find the wider framework in our \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/canopy-trees\"\u003eCanopy Trees\u003c\/a\u003e and evergreen company in our \u003ca href=\"\/collections\/conifers\"\u003eConifers\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"quercus-hemisphaerica","title":"Quercus hemisphaerica","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis 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, \u003cem\u003eQuercus hemisphaerica\u003c\/em\u003e Bartram ex Willd., the species epithet meaning half-a-globe, for the little domed cap that sits like a skullcap on the acorn.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe trade calls them Darlington oak. Whatever the name, these are the dry-land half of a long-running confusion: the laurel oaks come in two kinds, and where \u003cem\u003eQuercus laurifolia\u003c\/em\u003e takes the wet bottoms, \u003cem\u003ehemisphaerica\u003c\/em\u003e takes the high, sandy ground, the longleaf sandhills and dry hammocks, flowering a couple of weeks behind the swamp cousin. The leaves are the surprise on an oak, narrow and smooth-edged and willow-slim, glossy and laurel-like, with never a lobe in sight.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe trees are semi-evergreen, holding that polish straight through winter and trading the old leaves for new only as spring pushes them off, so a Darlington oak is never quite bare. What sells them is speed: they throw shade fast, which is why so many southern streets and squares are roofed in them. The honest catch is the other end of that bargain, since a fast oak is rarely a thousand-year oak, and these tend to soften and decline where the long-lived white oaks would still be hitting their stride.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant Darlington oak for the shade you want in this decade, not the next century, and the tree will not disappoint: a fast, near-evergreen canopy for a Southern lawn, street, courtyard, or naturalistic planting on high, sandy ground. Give full sun and sharp drainage, allow room for a fifty- to seventy-foot crown, and pair with other sandhill and dry-hammock natives. The acorns feed jays, squirrels, deer, and turkeys, one more reason the tree earns a place in a wildlife-minded Southern garden.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057950855283,"sku":"QUER-HEMI-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1039.jpg?v=1720140399"},{"product_id":"quercus-shumardii","title":"Quercus shumardii","description":"\u003cp\u003eThere 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuercus shumardii\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShumard 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eShumard 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Bare Root","offer_id":42820483252339,"sku":"QUER-SHUM-BARE","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"1 Gallon","offer_id":42820483285107,"sku":"QUER-SHUM-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusshumardiiWoodlandersSAW4.jpg?v=1738800209"},{"product_id":"quercus-phellos","title":"Quercus phellos","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe first surprise of \u003cem\u003eQuercus phellos\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a small joke folded into the name, too. Phellos is the old Greek word for the cork oak, so Linnaeus reached for the name of one tree to christen another that resembles neither cork oak nor, in fact, an oak at all, but a willow. Native to the bottomlands and moist flats of the coastal plains from Long Island south and well up the Mississippi valley, willow oak has spent the last century becoming \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/the-quiet-giant-quercus-phellos-and-the-soul-of-southern-landscapes\"\u003eone of the great street and shade trees of the South\u003c\/a\u003e, the reason so many old town squares and college quads are roofed in fine green shade.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey grow fast for an oak, two feet a year when young, into a clean trunk and an open, rounded crown of forty to sixty feet, and they shrug off clay, compaction, and city air. The texture is the seduction: where most oaks read as heavy, willow oak reads as light, almost airy, casting shade without the bulk. The small acorns feed everything, ducks especially.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant one and you are planting for the people who will sit under them long after you, which is the only honest reason to plant an oak at all. Use willow oak as a street or avenue tree, a fast shade tree for a large lawn, or a canopy anchor for a park or campus, on moist to average, well-drained ground with room for the broad crown. Pair with other bottomland and street-tough natives, and give the young tree early structural pruning to build a strong, single leader.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Bare Root","offer_id":42820468342899,"sku":"QUER-PHEL-BARE","price":16.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"1 Gallon","offer_id":42820468375667,"sku":"QUER-PHEL-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Quercus_phellos_male_84etoMz2R06A.jpg?v=1738799351"},{"product_id":"quercus-myrsinaefolia","title":"Quercus myrsinifolia","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe cup gives them away. Most oaks set their acorns in a cup of overlapping scales, but \u003cem\u003eQuercus myrsinifolia\u003c\/em\u003e belongs to the ring-cupped oaks of East Asia, the \u003cem\u003eCyclobalanopsis\u003c\/em\u003e, whose acorn sits in a cup banded with smooth concentric rings like a tiny stacked beehive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey come from the warm-temperate forests of Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan, long grown there as a garden and temple tree, and the Japanese reading of their narrow foliage earned them the name bamboo-leaf oak. The likeness is fair: the leaves are tapered and willow-fine, evergreen, glossy dark green, and they flush a deep bronze-purple when new, so the tree spends spring looking faintly stained with wine before settling to green. The bark is smooth and pale gray, closer to a beech than to the furrowed oaks most people picture.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey take heat, clay, and city air without complaint and hold their leaves through a Southern winter, which is most of the argument for using them as an evergreen street or screen tree where a live oak would grow too broad. For the longer story of how trees like this one shaped the gardens of Japan, our journal has \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/from-sakura-to-sugi-a-journey-through-japan-s-botanical-heritage\"\u003ea piece worth reading\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant bamboo-leaf oak where you want green all winter and something quietly foreign in the bones of the garden: an evergreen street or lawn tree, a tall clipped or informal screen, or a specimen sized for a courtyard or a smaller property where a live oak would overwhelm. Give full sun to light shade and well-drained soil, allow room for a thirty- to forty-five-foot crown, and enjoy the bronze-purple spring flush and the smooth, pale, beech-like bark year round.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057951215731,"sku":"QUER-MYRS-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusmyrsinaefoliaWoodlanders3.jpg?v=1737139596"},{"product_id":"quercus-michauxii","title":"Quercus michauxii","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuercus michauxii\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eTrees of the Southeastern States\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe swamp chestnut oak is a tree of the rich bottomlands, the floodplains and stream terraces of the Southern coastal plain, but the same deep, fertile ground that suits the wild tree makes for a superb shade or street tree on fertile upland sites as well. Given room, these trees build a broad, rounded crown of substantial dark foliage, silver-backed and striking in a breeze, and close the year in reddish-orange to deep burgundy, unusually good fall color for a white oak.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe acorns are the largest of any white oak, and among the sweetest: low enough in tannin that Native peoples of the Southeast ground and ate them with only minimal leaching, and palatable enough that livestock, and especially cattle, sought them out, which is how the tree earned the old country name cow oak. Deer, turkey, squirrels, and wood ducks take them just as eagerly, so a mature tree is a wildlife pantry every fall.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant swamp chestnut oak for the long view, on deep, moist, fertile, well-drained soil in full sun to part shade, as a specimen shade tree, a stately street or park tree, or an anchor for floodplain and bottomland restoration. The tree tolerates seasonal flooding but not permanent standing water, and takes moderate upland drought once established. Give room for a sixty- to eighty-foot tree with a broad crown, pair with other bottomland natives such as overcup oak and swamp tupelo on wet ground, and set the tree carefully, since a deep taproot makes a settled oak hard to move.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Bare Root","offer_id":42820444061811,"sku":"QUER-MICH-BARE","price":12.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"1 Gallon","offer_id":42820444094579,"sku":"QUER-MICH-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Quercus_michauxii_6_FuIb2tCwZOwF.jpg?v=1738797855"},{"product_id":"quercus-muehlenbergii","title":"Quercus muehlenbergii","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis 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 \u003cem\u003emuehlenbergii\u003c\/em\u003e we are stuck with.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe common name is older and kinder. Chinquapin is the chestnut family's word for a small sweet nut, and this oak wears chestnut-shaped leaves, glossy and coarsely toothed and pale beneath, to go with acorns that are themselves among the sweetest in the genus, edible nearly off the tree where most oaks need leaching to be borne.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat sets chinquapin oak apart from almost every other oak is a taste in ground. This is a limestone tree, happiest on sweet, alkaline, rocky soil where the acid-loving oaks turn sickly and yellow, which makes the species the answer to a question most growers cannot otherwise solve. The tree builds slowly into a medium oak with an open, rounded crown and ashy, flaky, white-oak bark good to look at all winter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGive chinquapin oak sun and a soil that leans alkaline, and the tree will quietly thrive where the others cannot: a specimen or shade tree for a limestone or high-pH lawn, a park, a street, or a naturalistic native planting on sweet, rocky ground. Full sun brings the best form; pair with other lime-tolerant natives, allow room for a broad, rounded, forty- to sixty-foot crown, and let the sweet acorns feed the deer, turkey, and squirrels that seek them out.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057951543411,"sku":"QUER-MUEH-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-216.jpg?v=1720140420"},{"product_id":"quercus-georgiana","title":"Quercus georgiana","description":"\u003cp\u003eGeorgia 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat narrow range makes Georgia oak genuinely imperiled. The species is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List and ranked vulnerable by NatureServe, the scattered outcrop populations pressed by trampling, drought, and hybridization. Growing a nursery-raised tree is a small, real act of conservation, keeping an uncommon native in gardens rather than leaving the whole story to a handful of rock domes. The epithet georgiana simply marks the state where the oak was first found, on Stone Mountain in the 1840s.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor all that rarity, Georgia oak is an easy and rewarding garden tree, and a good size for a smaller property where a great spreading oak would never fit. Give the plant full sun and acid, sharply drained soil, the leaner and rockier the better, and expect real drought and heat tolerance from a tree raised on granite. Hardy through USDA zones 5 to 8, the oak carries small acorns that ripen in their second year, in the way of the red oak group.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike all the oaks, Georgia oak earns a place in the food web many times over, the acorns feeding turkey, quail, and songbirds and the foliage hosting the caterpillars of hairstreaks, duskywings, and the great imperial moth. Set the tree as a small shade or specimen oak, in a native or pollinator planting, or simply as a collector's prize, and enjoy the good fall color and the quiet satisfaction of growing one of the South's rarest trees.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057951608947,"sku":"QUER-GEOR-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusgeorgianaPhilippedeSpoelberch.jpg?v=1784337494"},{"product_id":"quercus-coccinea","title":"Quercus coccinea","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe name is a promise the tree keeps only at the very end of the year. \u003cem\u003eCoccinea\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eScarlet oaks are trees of dry, sandy, acid uplands across the eastern states, the ridges and gravelly slopes where water runs off fast, and that upbringing makes them at home in a difficult yard: drought is no trouble, and unlike the pin oak they so often get mistaken for, they do not yellow and sulk. The way to tell the two apart is in the leaf, since scarlet's sinuses are cut in clean C-curves and pin's in tighter U's, and the scarlet acorn sits deeper in a turbaned cup.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe crown opens with age into something broad and airy, casting a broken, dappled shade rather than a heavy one, and Washington, D.C. thought enough of the species to make scarlet oak the official tree of the capital. Slower to find in the trade than the easy red and pin oaks, scarlet oak is the connoisseur's choice among the fast red oaks, which is the whole argument for planting one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGive scarlet oak full sun and a soil on the dry, acid side, and wait for October to make your case. Site the tree where the late fire can be seen from a distance, in a large lawn, a park, a campus, or a naturalistic planting, and keep the roots out of compacted, poorly drained clay. Like all the oaks, scarlet oak quietly anchors an ecosystem, feeding squirrels, jays, deer, and turkeys with the acorns and hosting a long roll of native insects and the birds that follow them. Pair with native grasses, amsonia, and woodland asters at the foot.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057951969395,"sku":"QUER-COCC-INEA-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-202.jpg?v=1720140425"},{"product_id":"quercus-laevis","title":"Quercus laevis","description":"\u003cp\u003eTurkey 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. \u003cem\u003eQuercus laevis\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey answer the heat with a trick worth knowing: the leaves hang vertically, turned edge-on to the midday sun, so the blade sheds the worst of the light instead of catching it, and the tree stays cool in a place that bakes. The species name \u003cem\u003elaevis\u003c\/em\u003e means smooth, for the glossy, hairless leaves, which turn a hard orange-red in November and hang on into the cold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTurkey oaks make a small, often crooked, characterful tree rather than a shade giant, and they belong with the company they evolved beside; our journal has \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/longleaf-pine-restoration-and-the-art-of-restraint-in-modern-landscape-design\"\u003ea piece on the longleaf sandhills\u003c\/a\u003e and the art of planting with their restraint. In that fire-run country the acorns feed deer, turkey, and jays on ground that offers little else.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGive turkey oak deep sand, full sun, and no irrigation to speak of, and the tree will thrive precisely where you had given up on growing an oak at all. Use the tree as a small, sculptural specimen in a dry native or xeric garden, a sandhill restoration, or a hot bank, and pair with longleaf pine, wiregrass, and other sandhill natives. Sharp drainage is everything; the one thing turkey oak will not forgive is wet, heavy ground.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057952034931,"sku":"QUER-LAEV-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-212.jpg?v=1720140427"},{"product_id":"quercus-alba-grandchildren-of-wye-oak","title":"Quercus alba 'Grandchildren of Wye Oak'","description":"\u003cp\u003eThese 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. \u003cem\u003eQuercus alba\u003c\/em\u003e '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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhite oak is the grandfather of the eastern forest, a slow, massive, immensely long-lived tree with a broad, rounded crown, pale flaky ash-gray bark, and deeply lobed blue-green leaves that turn russet and wine-red in fall. The rounded-lobed leaf is so emblematic of the American hardwood forest that The Nature Conservancy took the white oak leaf for its logo. Given room, these trees build the kind of spreading, cathedral canopy that shades generations.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo native tree has given more. White oak acorns are among the sweetest of the oaks, low enough in tannin that Native peoples across the East gathered, leached, and ground them into meal, and the acorns still feed deer, turkeys, squirrels, and jays every fall. The tannin-rich inner bark was one of the great astringents of Native American and settler herbalism, and the tight-grained, watertight timber built ships, barrels, and bourbon casks. A fuller account of the traditional medicinal uses appears in the notes below.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, plant these trees for the century, not the season, on an open, sunny site with deep, well-drained, slightly acid soil and room for a slow oak that can reach eighty feet and spread as wide. White oak resents having the roots disturbed once established, so choose the spot with care and let the roots settle undisturbed; underplant only at the outer dripline. To plant a grandchild of the Wye Oak is to hand the next generation a tree with a story already attached.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057952264307,"sku":"QUER-ALBA-GRAN-WYE-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-199.jpg?v=1720140430"},{"product_id":"quercus-myrtifolia","title":"Quercus myrtifolia","description":"\u003cp\u003eMyrtle 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. \u003cem\u003eQuercus myrtifolia\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey stay small there, a dense evergreen shrub or low tree holding glossy dark leaves the year round, shrugging off drought, heat, and salt spray with the ease of something that has never known better conditions and would not trust them if offered. They are little seen in the trade and worth seeking out for exactly the spots that defeat other evergreens: a coastal bank, a hot dry corner, a low clipped screen that never browns.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the wild, myrtle oak is a keystone of the Florida scrub, that rare, fire-shaped, sand-ridge community found almost nowhere else, and the acorns feed scrub jays and a long list of others through the lean months. The dense, low thickets give cover to the birds, tortoises, and small mammals of a habitat that is vanishing acre by acre.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant myrtle oak where the ground is sand and the air is salt, and let the shrub do quietly what almost nothing else will: a coastal or dune planting, a hot, dry native bed, a low evergreen screen or informal hedge, or a sculptural small specimen on a sandy bank. Give full sun and sharp drainage, pair with saw palmetto, sand pine, and other scrub natives, and expect an evergreen that shrugs off exactly the conditions that brown out lesser plants.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057952395379,"sku":"QUER-MYRT-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-218.jpg?v=1720140434"},{"product_id":"quercus-chapmanii","title":"Quercus chapmanii","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis 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 \u003cem\u003eFlora of the Southern United States\u003c\/em\u003e, published in 1860, stood for decades as the book on the region's plants; this scrub oak carries his name in thanks.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuercus chapmanii\u003c\/em\u003e is an oak of the deep coastal sands, the scrub and sandhills from South Carolina around to the Gulf, and the tree keeps to the white oak side of the family, with rounded, untoothed leaves rather than the bristled points of the red oaks. The leaves are glossy and obovate, oddly large and handsome for so dry a setting, and they hang on late, dropping only as the new ones push in spring, so Chapman oak reads as nearly evergreen through a mild winter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eChapman oak stays modest, a large shrub or small tree, tough past the point of complaint about heat, drought, and salt. In the wild the tree is a fixture of Florida scrub, where the acorns feed jays, deer, and small mammals, and the low, twiggy thickets shelter the birds and gopher tortoises of that vanishing habitat.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant Chapman oak in sand and sun where you want glossy, near-evergreen structure and an honest piece of Gulf-coast botanical history in the bargain: a dry native or coastal planting, a sandy screen, or a low, characterful specimen on ground that defeats thirstier trees. Give sharp drainage and full sun, pair with other sandhill and scrub natives, and expect a slow, salt- and drought-proof shrub-oak that asks almost nothing once settled.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057952428147,"sku":"QUER-CHAP-01G","price":18.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercuschapmaniiKew.jpg?v=1743894155"},{"product_id":"quercus-lyrata","title":"Quercus lyrata","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe 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. \u003cem\u003eQuercus lyrata\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat patience is the whole of their character. They belong to the white oak group, carry lyre-shaped lobed leaves that give the species the name, and grow slowly into a stout, round-crowned shade tree of sixty to eighty feet.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat the wild bottoms taught them turns out to be exactly what a hard site in town wants: an oak almost indifferent to the soil, taking heavy clay, standing water, compaction, and summer drought with the same composure, which is more than most trees will give you on a parking lot island or a stormwater edge. The heavy acorns float, the way the whole strategy floats, riding the next high water downstream and feeding wood ducks and turkeys along the way.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant overcup oak where the ground is difficult and the timeline is long: a bottomland or rain garden, a pond or stream edge, a stormwater basin, or a tough urban site, a parking island, a street verge, a compacted lawn, that would defeat a fussier tree. Give full sun and room for a broad, round crown, pair with bald cypress, swamp tupelo, and other bottomland natives on wet ground, and enjoy one of the most adaptable and underused of the native shade oaks.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057952526451,"sku":"QUER-LYRA-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1101.jpg?v=1720140440"},{"product_id":"quercus-imbricaria","title":"Quercus imbricaria","description":"\u003cp\u003eShingle 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe name recalls a frontier use: early settlers split the straight-grained wood into roof shingles and clapboards, and both the common name and the Latin imbricaria, meaning overlapping like tiles, remember that history. In fall the leaves turn a warm yellow-brown to russet, and many of them hang on well into winter, a habit called marcescence that gives young trees a soft rustle and a measure of screening when everything else is bare.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the gardener, shingle oak has one great practical virtue beyond good looks: the tree is one of the easiest oaks to move, transplanting far more readily than most, and it shrugs off city life, tolerating pollution, compaction, clay, drought, and even the juglone under black walnuts. Give the tree full sun and reasonable drainage, and it will settle into almost any soil, hardy through USDA zones 4 to 8, at a steady, unhurried pace.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs an oak, shingle oak carries the whole weight of an oak's ecology, the acorns feeding deer, turkey, squirrels, and songbirds, the foliage hosting a long roll call of moths and butterflies. Use the tree as a shade or street tree, a lawn specimen, or, leaning on those winter-held leaves, a screen or windbreak. Distinctive, adaptable, and genuinely tough, this is an oak that deserves to be planted far more than it is.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057952624755,"sku":"QUER-IMBR-01G","price":19.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusimbricariaJulieMakin.jpg?v=1784337681"},{"product_id":"quercus-ilicifolia","title":"Quercus ilicifolia","description":"\u003cp\u003eBear 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe name is a small joke on the botanist. Ilicifolia means holly-leaved, but the sharp-lobed, bristle-tipped leaves are not really holly-like at all, closer to a small red oak leaf than to any holly. The common name is more honest: black bears fatten on the bitter acorns before winter, and so do deer, turkey, grouse, and jays, which makes bear oak a genuine wildlife plant. In the pine barrens of southern New England the shrub is the primary host for nearly a third of the region's rarest moths and butterflies, an ecological keystone in disguise.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs a garden plant, bear oak asks for the opposite of pampering. Full sun and poor, dry, sandy or rocky, acid soil are all the tree wants, and drought only firms up the constitution; the one thing to avoid is wet ground. Fire holds no terror here, since the shrub resprouts vigorously from the base after being cut or burned, which makes bear oak a fine choice for stabilizing a raw sandy bank or reclaiming difficult ground. Hardy through USDA zones 4 to 7, the plant turns reddish-purple in fall.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFew nurseries offer bear oak, which is reason enough for a certain gardener to want one. Use the shrub to naturalize a poor, sunny slope, to anchor a wildlife or pine-barrens planting, or as a rugged, characterful small specimen where nothing fussier would survive. This is a plant for the honest hard place, and it rewards the gardener who works with the site rather than against it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057953280115,"sku":"QUER-ILIC-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-206.jpg?v=1720140457"},{"product_id":"quercus-incana","title":"Quercus incana","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe name is the whole description: \u003cem\u003eincana\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuercus incana\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBluejack 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 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/longleaf-pine-restoration-and-the-art-of-restraint-in-modern-landscape-design\"\u003ea piece worth your time\u003c\/a\u003e. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057953607795,"sku":"QUER-INCA-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusincanaWoodlanders1.jpg?v=1737139374"},{"product_id":"quercus-margaretta","title":"Quercus margaretta","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis 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 \u003cem\u003eQuercus margaretta\u003c\/em\u003e in honor of Margaret Henry Wilcox, whom he would wed in 1905; few oaks carry so personal a dedication.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn plain terms, this is the sandhill cousin of the post oak, a smaller, finer-boned version of \u003cem\u003eQuercus stellata\u003c\/em\u003e that trades the bottomland clay for dry, deep, sandy upland and shrinks to suit the ground. The leaves keep the post oak's cross-shaped silhouette, that broad-shouldered Maltese-cross outline, but cut neater and smaller, and the tree holds to the white oak group, all rounded lobes and no bristles.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOften sand post oak runs as a low, colonizing thicket on the poorest sand, which is exactly the use: a tough, native, small-scale oak for ground that turns away anything thirstier. The sweet acorns feed deer, turkey, and small mammals in country that offers little else. For the longer story of the better-known relative, our journal has \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/quercus-stellata-post-oak-boundary-tree\"\u003ea piece on the post oak\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlant sand post oak in sand and sun where a full-sized oak would be too much and nothing else feels quite native enough: a dry native or xeric garden, a sandhill restoration, or a low, informal screen or thicket on a hot, sandy bank. Give sharp drainage and full sun, allow the colonizing habit room where a drift is welcome, and pair with turkey oak, longleaf pine, and other sandhill natives. Salt- and drought-proof, and asking almost nothing once settled.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057953935475,"sku":"QUER-MARG-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-214.jpg?v=1720140470"},{"product_id":"quercus-agrifolia","title":"Quercus agrifolia","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuercus agrifolia\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFew trees have fed more people. For thousands of years the acorns of the coast live oak were a staple food for the Indigenous peoples of California, gathered in autumn, dried, ground, and leached of their bitter tannins to make meal and porridge, and the tree remains a keystone of the local ecosystem, the acorns and evergreen shelter sustaining woodpeckers, jays, deer, and a long list of insects. The name \u003cem\u003eagrifolia\u003c\/em\u003e, meaning sharp-leaved or field-leaved, points to that holly-like foliage.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a western tree in an eastern nursery, and that is part of the story. Coast live oak is seldom grown east of El Paso, but Woodlanders raised these plants from seed of trees planted in El Paso, Texas, and they have grown well in South Carolina on sunny, sharply drained sites, the kind of conditions many California and southwestern plants insist on. A few of the plants belong to the southern California variety \u003cem\u003eoxydenia\u003c\/em\u003e, though they do not look clearly distinct. Photos courtesy of Oaktopia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, give coast live oak the open, hot, well-drained position it wants: a specimen lawn, a dry native or Mediterranean-style planting, or a courtyard tree for a warm-climate garden, with room for the wide, spreading canopy to develop. Give full sun, sharp drainage, and little or no summer water once established, since soggy summer soil invites root disease. Pair with manzanita, ceanothus, sages, and other drought-tolerant companions, and keep thirsty, shallow-rooted plantings out from under the canopy, where the roots resent the competition and the water.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057955147891,"sku":"QUER-AGRI-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusagrifoliaOaktopia1.png?v=1730390991"},{"product_id":"quercus-salicina","title":"Quercus salicina","description":"\u003cp\u003eA small-to-medium evergreen oak unlike anything in the North American flora. \u003cem\u003eQuercus salicina\u003c\/em\u003e belongs to section \u003cem\u003eCyclobalanopsis\u003c\/em\u003e of the oak genus, the ring-cupped oaks, an entirely Asian group of evergreen oaks distinguished from every American oak by the concentric rings on the acorn cup, rather than the overlapping scales of the red and white oak groups. Some taxonomists treat \u003cem\u003eCyclobalanopsis\u003c\/em\u003e as a genus of its own. To grow this oak in a Southeastern garden is to bring in a fundamentally different evolutionary lineage, one that has been evolving in isolation in the temperate forests of Japan and Korea for tens of millions of years, in parallel with the separate American radiation. The result reads as recognizably \u003cem\u003eQuercus\u003c\/em\u003e in habit and presence, yet is architecturally distinct in nearly every detail.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe species is native to the temperate mountain forests of Japan, chiefly Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, with disjunct populations in southern Korea. The Japanese common name \u003cem\u003eurajirogashi\u003c\/em\u003e translates as white-backed oak, a reference to the most distinctive feature of the foliage: the waxy silver-white coating on the underside of every leaf. Look up at a mature specimen on a breezy day and the canopy flashes silver as the leaves turn in the wind. The white is not down or hairs but a fine waxy powder, which can even be rubbed off by heat, so a leaf held over a flame will green, though most gardeners decline the experiment. The other Japanese name, \u003cem\u003ehosobagashi\u003c\/em\u003e, means narrow-leaf oak, and the Latin epithet \u003cem\u003esalicina\u003c\/em\u003e, chosen by the Dutch botanist Karl Ludwig Blume in 1851, means willow-like, both names describing the elegant, elongated, lance-shaped leaves, genuinely more reminiscent of a \u003cem\u003eSalix\u003c\/em\u003e than of any American oak.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAmong the arborists and oak collectors who know the tree, the praise is unusual. Barry Yinger called this probably the most beautiful of the temperate zone's evergreen oaks (1990); Tom Hohn described an exceptionally handsome small specimen or patio tree (1993); and Béatrice Chassé, who has written extensively on cultivated oaks, called the tree simply a perfect, graceful tree (2017). The unanimity is rare in the oak world, where most species have their detractors.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, this oak forms a low-branching, rounded-to-vase-shaped evergreen tree, eventually reaching thirty to sixty feet in ideal native conditions but typically settling to a more refined fifteen to twenty-five feet in cultivation, often shrubby in youth before developing a single trunk and broader crown over decades. The leaves are three to five inches long, narrow and lance-shaped, toothed on the upper half of the blade, glossy dark green above and silver-white below, and the new growth emerges in remarkable copper-bronze, purple, and rose tones, holding for two to three weeks in spring before maturing to green, a moment few gardeners expect from an oak. The bark is smooth, finely fissured, and grayish-black, with white lenticels on the young branchlets, and the acorns mature over two seasons in the banded \u003cem\u003eCyclobalanopsis\u003c\/em\u003e cup. The plants offered here have done very well at Woodlanders in Aiken, a meaningful local record for a tree that remains genuinely rare in American cultivation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a tree for the oak collector building a serious \u003cem\u003eQuercus\u003c\/em\u003e collection, especially one that reaches into the Asian evergreens; for the gardener wanting a refined, small-scale evergreen specimen; for the Southeastern designer after a non-native alternative to live oak at residential scale; and for anyone who has been looking for an evergreen oak with the texture of a willow and the shimmer of silver leaves in the wind. Give full sun to part shade, well-drained soil, and a sheltered spot in zones 8 and 9, and site the tree where the silver undersides and the copper spring flush can be seen up close.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057955475571,"sku":"QUER-SALI-01G","price":31.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-223.jpg?v=1720140499"},{"product_id":"quercus-virginiana","title":"Quercus virginiana","description":"\u003cp\u003eFew trees carry the weight of the South the way the live oak does. \u003cem\u003eQuercus virginiana\u003c\/em\u003e is the massive, broad-spreading, long-lived evergreen oak of the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas, the tree of avenues and old plantations, of moss-hung branches reaching low and wide over generations of the same ground. Given room and time, a live oak grows far wider than tall, the great limbs sweeping out and often down to rest on the earth, and the whole tree becomes a piece of living architecture. Georgia named the live oak the state tree, and ancient specimens are landmarks across the Deep South.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe two-to-three-inch leaves are small, leathery, and unlobed, dark and glossy above and pale beneath, and the tree holds them nearly year round, dropping and replacing the old foliage in spring so a live oak is never truly bare. Spanish moss drapes the wide branches in the humid coastal air, part of the tree's whole romantic effect, and the deeply furrowed bark and heavy, sinuous limbs give a live oak presence in every season.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo native tree has served harder. Live oak wood is among the densest and strongest of any oak, so strong that the frames of the frigate USS Constitution were built of live oak, earning the ship the name Old Ironsides when British cannonballs seemed to bounce off the hull. The small acorns are unusually sweet for an oak, low enough in tannin that Native peoples of the Southeast gathered and ate them and pressed them for a cooking oil, and the acorns still feed deer, turkey, wood ducks, and squirrels every fall. A mature live oak is a whole ecosystem, hosting a long roll of insects, birds, and epiphytes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, plant live oak only where there is room for a very large tree, sixty to eighty feet across or more, as a specimen or avenue tree for a lawn, a park, a campus, or a long drive in the warm coastal South. Give full sun and well-drained soil, allow the low, sweeping limbs the space they want rather than limbing them up too high, and plant for the centuries. Native as far north as southeastern Virginia, live oak can be pushed a little beyond the native range in a sheltered, warm spot.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057955639411,"sku":"QUER-VIRG-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-225.jpg?v=1720140502"},{"product_id":"quercus-geminata","title":"Quercus geminata","description":"\u003cp\u003eSand 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe two are close kin, long lumped together, and the telling differences are worth knowing. The leaves of sand live oak are strongly rolled under at the edges and often puckered, gray and felted beneath, and the acorns come in pairs on a slender stalk, which is exactly what the name geminata, twinned, records. Native from coastal Carolina down through Florida and west along the Gulf, the tree keeps to deep sandy soils, scrub, and dunes where few other oaks will thrive.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor a well-drained, sun-baked, or seaside site, few evergreens are tougher. Sand live oak takes drought, heat, salt spray, and wind in stride, grows slowly to a rounded twenty to forty feet, and asks almost nothing once established, hardy through USDA zones 7 to 10. Like all the oaks, the tree earns a place ecologically many times over: the paired acorns feed deer, turkey, jays, and squirrels, and the foliage hosts the caterpillars of hairstreaks, duskywings, and the great imperial moth.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhere a live oak would simply grow too large, sand live oak makes the graceful substitute, an evergreen specimen or shade tree for a smaller, drier lot, a coastal windbreak, or a xeric native planting. The catkins are inconspicuous in spring, the interest all in the year-round canopy and the character of an old, gnarled trunk. Native peoples ground acorns like these into meal once the bitter tannins were leached away, one more thread in the long human history of the oaks.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057955737715,"sku":"QUER-GEMI-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-226.jpg?v=1720140506"},{"product_id":"quercus-virginiana-bok-tower","title":"Quercus virginiana 'Bok Tower'","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Southern live oak needs no introduction in the coastal South, where the great, spreading, moss-draped evergreens are as much a part of the landscape as the light. \u003cem\u003eQuercus virginiana\u003c\/em\u003e 'Bok Tower' begins from that familiar species but carries an unusual story and, perhaps, an unusual future.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe acorns for this selection were collected at the famous Bok Tower Gardens in central Florida, from a single, most peculiar specimen. Surrounded by normal-looking live oaks, that plant is dense and all but trunkless, only about eight feet tall, growing outward rather than up until it covers some thirty feet of ground, a live oak that behaves like a great low mound.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhether the offspring will inherit that low, spreading habit is an open question, and an honest one. We cannot promise that these seedlings will grow as their strange parent did, but we hope some of you with room in zones 8 and 9 will plant them, watch, and let us know. That is part of the pleasure of a plant like this: to take part in a small, unfinished experiment in a living thing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSite 'Bok Tower' in full sun on well-drained ground with room to spread, as a low, sculptural evergreen mound, a broad groundcover-scaled specimen, or simply a live oak grown for curiosity and conversation. Give the warmth of zones 8 and 9, expect the same tough, salt- and drought-tolerant constitution as the species, and treat the eventual habit as a happy uncertainty rather than a guarantee. However the tree grows, each plant carries a piece of one of Florida's most beloved gardens in the acorn.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057956393075,"sku":"QUER-VIRG-BOK-TOWE-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}]},{"product_id":"quercus-prinoides","title":"Quercus prinoides","description":"\u003cp\u003eDwarf chinquapin oak is the oak for gardeners in a hurry, a small, shrubby white oak that starts bearing sweet acorns while still only a few feet tall. Where most oaks make you wait a generation, this one fruits at three to five years old and crops nearly every year after, a rare and useful trick. The plant grows as a rhizomatous, colony-forming shrub or small tree of ten to twenty feet, clothed in glossy, chestnut-like leaves with wavy, blunt teeth.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe acorns are the point, and they are the good kind. As a member of the white oak group, dwarf chinquapin oak bears sweet, low-tannin acorns that ripen in a single season, palatable to people with little or no leaching and relished by nearly everything with fur or feathers: deer, turkey, quail, grouse, squirrels, and jays. The epithet prinoides means resembling Prinus, the old name for the chestnut oak, for the chestnut-like toothing of the leaves. Few native plants pack so much wildlife value into so small a package.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is a tough, undemanding native of dry, sterile, sunny ground, glades and barrens and rocky slopes from the Midwest to the eastern Piedmont, asking for the same in the garden: full sun and lean, well-drained, even rocky or slightly limy soil. Drought and heat are no trouble, and the rhizomatous habit slowly builds a low thicket that can be left to spread or kept in bounds. Hardy through USDA zones 5 to 8, the leaves color bronze, gold, and copper-red in fall.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor a smaller property, an edible landscape, or a wildlife planting, dwarf chinquapin oak is one of the most rewarding oaks going, offering an oak's ecology and a sweet, early acorn crop at shrub scale. Naturalize the plant on a dry sunny bank, plant a small grove for the wildlife, or grow one as a low specimen, and enjoy an oak that gives back within a few short years rather than a few long decades.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057958457459,"sku":"QUER-PRIN-01G","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusprinoidesArnoldArboretum.jpg?v=1784337875"},{"product_id":"quercus-acerifolia","title":"Quercus acerifolia","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuercus acerifolia\u003c\/em\u003e is one of the rarest oaks in North America, and one of the most quietly beautiful. The name says the first thing you notice: \u003cem\u003eacerifolia\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe wild story is a precarious one. Maple-leaf oak is endemic to just a handful of high, rocky ridgetops in the Ouachita Mountains of west-central Arkansas, among them Magazine, Porter, Pryor, and Sugarloaf mountains, and nowhere else on earth. Listed as critically imperiled in Arkansas and endangered on the IUCN Red List of oaks, the species survives in the wild in only a few isolated stands, and much of the species' future rests with cultivated trees in botanic gardens and arboreta. To plant one is to take a small, direct part in that conservation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese plants carry a good pedigree. Most maple-leaf oaks in cultivation trace back to a fine specimen at the Morton Arboretum in Illinois, and the Woodlanders stock was grown from seed collected from a cultivated tree at the Shaw Arboretum in Missouri, with little or no sign of the hybrid intergrade that can blur the identity of a rare oak grown near common ones. What you receive is as true to the wild species as a nursery tree is likely to be.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, give maple-leaf oak an open, sunny, sharply drained site that echoes the rocky ridgetops of the wild: a lawn specimen, a naturalistic native planting, or the anchor of a collector's oak grove, where the maple-like leaves and clean fall color can be read against the sky. Give full sun to part shade and well-drained soil, avoid heavy, wet ground, and allow room for a slow tree of twenty to forty feet. Like all oaks, the tree quietly feeds a world of insects and birds, and pairs naturally with other well-drained-soil natives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057960456307,"sku":"QUER-ACER-01G","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusacerifoliaMBG.jpg?v=1753914283"},{"product_id":"quercus-nuttallii","title":"Quercus texana (nuttallii)","description":"\u003cp\u003eNuttall 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 \u003cem\u003eQuercus nuttallii\u003c\/em\u003e, the tree now carries the name \u003cem\u003eQuercus texana\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor most of the twentieth century Nuttall oak went overlooked, mistaken in the trade for other red oaks, but the tree has since become a favorite of growers for good reason. Fast, clean, and easy to transplant, Nuttall oak builds a straight trunk and a well-shaped, open crown, and finishes the year in some of the most dependable red-oak fall color of the South, brilliant red and scarlet often lingering into winter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe wild home is the bottomland, and it shows in the temperament. Nuttall oak takes heavy, wet clay and seasonal flooding that would drown many oaks, yet adapts just as readily to ordinary garden and street conditions, shrugging off compaction and city air. The heavy annual acorn crop is prized by wood ducks and other waterfowl, along with deer, turkey, and squirrels, which makes the tree as valuable for wildlife and bottomland restoration as for shade.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, use Nuttall oak as a fast shade or street tree for a large lawn, a park, a parking island, a rain garden, or a low, wet spot where quicker shade is wanted and standing water defeats other trees. Give full sun and room for a sixty- to eighty-foot crown, water young trees to establish, and give early structural pruning for a strong single leader. Pair with overcup oak, bald cypress, and other bottomland natives on wet ground.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Bare Root","offer_id":42820458479731,"sku":"QUER-TEXA-FORM-NUT-BARE","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"1 Gallon","offer_id":42820458512499,"sku":"QUER-TEXA-01G","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Quercusnuttallii-WoodlandersMBG.jpg?v=1738798863"},{"product_id":"quercus-oglethorpensis","title":"Quercus oglethorpensis","description":"\u003cp\u003eFew oaks in North America are rarer. \u003cem\u003eQuercus oglethorpensis\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is, despite long mislabeling, a member of the white oak group: the leaves are narrow, elliptic, and untoothed, without the bristle tips of the red oaks, and the acorns ripen in a single season rather than waiting out two. Those leaves are the ornament, slim and refined for an oak, turning soft orange to red in autumn over a clean, rounded crown of moderate size, more at home on a campus or a large lawn than many of the outsized cousins in the genus.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe grow Oglethorpe oak because someone must. The fuller history and ecology are laid out in \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/a-guide-to-quercus-oglethorpensis-history-ecology-botany-and-design\"\u003eour guide to the species\u003c\/a\u003e. To plant one is a small act of keeping, a way of holding a vanishing tree in the ground a little longer, and that, more than the fall color, is the reason to find the tree room.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, treat Oglethorpe oak as a refined, moderate-sized shade or specimen tree for a campus, a large lawn, a park, or a naturalistic native planting on good upland ground. Give full sun to part shade and well-drained soil, allow room for a forty- to sixty-foot rounded crown, and pair with other Piedmont natives. The slim, willow-like leaves and clean orange-to-red fall color are handsome in their own right, but the deeper reason to grow the tree is conservation: every planted Oglethorpe oak is one more foothold for a species the wild is losing.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057961472115,"sku":"QUER-OGLE-01G","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1189.jpg?v=1720140582"},{"product_id":"quercus-stellata","title":"Quercus stellata","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuercus stellata\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe name \u003cem\u003estellata\u003c\/em\u003e points to the star-shaped hairs that once gave the foliage a faint silvery cast, but the surer mark is the leaf itself: thick, leathery, and dark green, cut into a bold cross of squared-off lobes, a cruciform silhouette often likened to a Maltese cross, or, more affectionately in the southern Midwest, a ghost. No other oak leaf reads quite the same, even from a distance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePost oak is quietly noble in horticulture, less common in the trade than live oak or willow oak but increasingly valued by designers for exceptional drought tolerance, an easy indifference to poor soil, and a lifespan that often stretches for centuries. The broad, rounded crown casts deep, cool shade over a town square, a park, or a large garden, and the thick, fire-resistant bark tells of a life in the southern pine barrens, where post oak has endured centuries of lightning and low ground fires. As a keystone of the oak-hickory forest, the acorns feed deer, turkey, and a long list of birds and small mammals.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Aiken, South Carolina, and in many old southern towns, great spreading post oaks still watch over generations, a reminder that a tree can be more than shade, a marker of place and a bearer of memory across centuries. For gardeners and stewards planting with an eye toward biodiversity and native resilience, \u003cem\u003eQuercus stellata\u003c\/em\u003e offers permanence and sustenance both.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGive post oak the open, sunny, sharply drained ground it prefers and room for a broad, sixty- to eighty-foot crown, as a long-term specimen or shade tree for a large lawn, a park, or a naturalistic native planting. Post oak resents root disturbance and wet feet, so site the tree carefully on dry, well-drained ground and leave the roots undisturbed. Pair with other oak-hickory natives, and plant for the long view.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAdditional photos courtesy of Stephanie Brundage.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057961603187,"sku":"QUER-STEL-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1102.jpg?v=1720140590"},{"product_id":"quercus-acutissima-gobbler","title":"Quercus acutissima 'Gobbler'","description":"\u003cp\u003eQuercus acutissima 'Gobbler' is a deciduous dense, broad, oval-rounded to broad-rounded tree with low-slung, wide-spreading branches. The cultivar Gobbler is the result of open-pollinated progeny that produce early and abundant acorns. One of the fastest growing oaks, especially in youth. Thrives in the heat of the South. Plant in well-drained, acidic soil but, also adaptable to other types of soil. This species is often confused with Chestnut because of leaf similarity. New Spring foliage is brilliant yellow to golden yellow. Often planted for wildlife especially wild turkeys which consume the acorns. It is also used as a shade or lawn tree. Quercus acutissima is native to eastern Asia.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057962160243,"sku":"QUER-ACUT-GOBB-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1915.jpg?v=1720140600"},{"product_id":"quercus-alba","title":"Quercus alba","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuercus alba\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo native tree has given more. White oak acorns are among the sweetest of the oaks, low enough in tannin that Native peoples across eastern North America gathered, leached, and ground them into a staple meal, and the acorns still feed deer, turkeys, squirrels, wood ducks, and jays every fall. The timber is legendary in its own right, tight-grained and watertight, the wood of ships, barrels, and bourbon casks; the very name white oak conjures the material as much as the tree.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe bark carried the medicine. Rich in tannins, white oak inner bark was one of the great astringents of Native American and settler herbalism, taken for looseness of the gut and gargled for a raw throat, and used externally as a wash for wounds and inflammation. The genus name \u003cem\u003eQuercus\u003c\/em\u003e is the old Latin for oak, and it hides a small piece of chemistry: quercetin, the antioxidant pigment first drawn from oak, is named for the tree. A fuller account of the traditional uses appears in the medicinal notes below.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, plant white oak for the long view, the way an earlier generation planted the trees now shading their grandchildren. Give an open, sunny site with deep, well-drained, slightly acid soil and plenty of room for a slow tree that can reach eighty feet and spread as wide, a lawn specimen, a park or estate tree, or the anchor of a native woodland. White oak resents having the roots disturbed once established, so site the tree carefully and let the roots settle undisturbed; underplant only at the outer dripline, and let a great oak become, over decades, the finest thing in the garden.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42204403925107,"sku":"QUER-ALBA-01G","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Quercus-Able_White_Oak_Tree_West_Hartford_CT_-_June_17_2013_2-1920x1437.jpg?v=1736631856"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/collections\/one-wonderful-autumn-tree_1398-1712_63ba1725-d1ea-4eb0-a751-74e4d2aece23.jpg?v=1784808046","url":"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/collections\/oaks.oembed?page=2","provider":"Woodlanders","version":"1.0","type":"link"}