The most valuable tree most people can plant. Long-lived and grand, an oak feeds more wildlife than any other tree in North America and becomes the tree a whole landscape is built around.
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
The name is a promise the tree keeps only at the very end of the year. Coccinea 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.
The 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. Quercus lyrata 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.
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."
The first surprise of Quercus phellos 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.
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 stellata, 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.
Quercus acerifolia is one of the rarest oaks in North America, and one of the most quietly beautiful. The name says the first thing you notice: acerifolia 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.
Quercus 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.
Quercus agrifolia, 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.
This 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 Flora of the Southern United States, published in 1860, stood for decades as the book on the region's plants; this scrub oak carries his name in thanks.
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.
This 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, Quercus hemisphaerica Bartram ex Willd., the species epithet meaning half-a-globe, for the little domed cap that sits like a skullcap on the acorn.
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.
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.
Turkey 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. Quercus laevis 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.
This 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 Quercus margaretta in honor of Margaret Henry Wilcox, whom he would wed in 1905; few oaks carry so personal a dedication.
