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
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.
Dwarf 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.
Few trees carry the weight of the South the way the live oak does. Quercus virginiana 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.
