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.
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.
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.
