Home › Volumes › Trees › How to Know the Trees

Oaks — Part 3

White-oak lumber is becoming rare and correspondingly high priced. Its quality is of the first order. Clear, quarter-sawed oak exhibits a higher percentage of the "mirrors" (pith rays) than any other species. Its durability, hardness and fine colour are exceptional among oaks. So great is the demand for it in the finer decorative arts employing wood that it is going out of use in general construction where inferior woods can be substituted. Roots of white oak, sawed, planed and polished, present a wood of extraordinary beauty. It is pale yellow in colour, tinged with olive, and shows a feathered grain of intricate and graceful pattern. The lustre of it is equal to that of mahogany or rosewood. Fifty years ago Nuttall cited an instance of an English cabinetmaker paying five pounds sterling for the roots of a single tree, counting that furniture veneered with it would vie with the finest.

Bur or Mossy-cup oak (Quercus macrocarpa, Michx.)--A large tree, 75 to 160 feet high, with spreading branches, and irregular, round head. Bark greyish brown, deeply furrowed, becoming scaly; branches roughened with thick, corky ridges; twigs winged or smooth, stout, and pubescent at first. Wood brown, with paler sap wood, close grained, heavy, hard, durable in soil; medullary rays conspicuous. Buds small, blunt pointed, pubescent. Leaves obovate, alternate, 6 to 12 inches long, 3 to 6 inches wide, 5 to 7-lobed; sinuses rounded, shallow or deep, middle ones often wider, opposite and nearly reach the midrib; petioles short, grooved; summer colour lustrous dark green, with pale, or silvery pubescent lining; autumn colour yellow or brown. Flowers with half-grown leaves in May; staminate in hairy yellow catkins; pistillate, with hairy red scales and bright red stigmas. Acorns annual, 1/2 to 2 inches long, ovoid, variable in size and shape, pubescent, in deep (rarely shallow) cup, brown, hairy, with loose scales and mossy fringe. Kernel white, sweet. Preferred habitat, rich, well-drained soil. Distribution, Nova Scotia to Montana; south to Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas. Uses: Same as Q. alba. Picturesque park tree. Easily transplanted when young.

The bur oak is a rugged-looking tree, more picturesque than its near relative, the white oak, which is conventional and symmetrical when it has its own way in growing. The bur oak flings out its antlered arms without regard for balance and symmetry, and casts off the bark of its shaggy limbs with utter indifference to any law of neatness. Broad corky wings are seen even on young twigs, and these are stout and curiously gnarled.

The leaves are of unusual length and deeply cut into irregular fingers, or broader lobes. Often two opposite sinuses, wider than the rest, almost cut the leaf in two in the middle. Bright and shining above, these leaves are woolly lined and thick.

The acorns are very striking in appearance. The brown nut is often 2 inches long and set in a thick, hairy cup, covered with coarse, pointed scales that become elongated toward the rim, and form a loose, fringed border. The nut is half covered by the cup as a rule. Sometimes it is quite swallowed up in it. From this the species is sometimes, but erroneously, called the overcup oak.

This tree is one of the most widely distributed and valuable of North American oaks. It has an astonishing power of adaptation to different regions and climates. It grows from Nova Scotia to western Texas; there are forests of it in Winnipeg; it forms the "oak openings" of Minnesota and Dakota. It seems as much at home in the hot and arid stretches of the West and Southwest as in the cold, damp air of the coast of New England, or the fertile valley of the Ohio, where it reached nearly 200 feet in height in the virgin forests.

The sturdiness of the bur oak, its rapid growth in good soil, its rugged picturesqueness, winter and summer, all commend it to planters. It is one of the most ornamental of American oaks in cultivation; and the raising and transplanting of it are fairly easy. People who do not plant oaks because they take so long to become big trees miss much pleasure they have not counted on. It may be children's children who see the aged tree, beautiful in its expression of massiveness and rugged strength. But the planter enjoys the grace of the sapling, the rich foliage of the young tree which is always larger than on the old ones; and there is very early seen in any bur oak the stocky build and the shaggy bark that mark the adult tree. It grows rapidly, and soon blossoms and fruits freely. Every year shows gains, and the cycle of the year in the treetop is worthy of close attention.