Quercus imbricaria

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 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.

For 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.

As 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.