Quercus myrsinifolia

The cup gives them away. Most oaks set their acorns in a cup of overlapping scales, but Quercus myrsinifolia belongs to the ring-cupped oaks of East Asia, the Cyclobalanopsis, whose acorn sits in a cup banded with smooth concentric rings like a tiny stacked beehive.

They 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.

They 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 a piece worth reading.

Plant 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.