Wednesday, August 26, 2009

It's a WHAT Oak?


This should have been the easiest thing to identify. It's a tree right in my front yard with the tag from the nursery on it still.
The tag read, "Oak, Live."
Well, duh, who in their right minds would buy a DEAD tree from a nursery. So I promptly forgot about it until about a week later I was reading through a paper and found that someone was given a "Live Oak" as a prize and how wonderful they were.
Oh, so that's a type of oak along with white and red. It doesn't help that the leaves aren't normal oak shaped.
Live Oak (or Evergreen Oak) is actually a broad term for several sections in the genus Quercus.* It gets the name "Evergreen" and "Live" from the fact that even in the Winter it stays green and alive looking whereas other Oaks are bare and dead looking. The leaves drop and regrow in the course of a couple of weeks in early spring.

Live Oak isn't just one species or subspecies, it's multiple genuses; this is making it a booger to pin down what it is. It could be a Southern or Texas Live Oak or five or six or more others. So I made a decision to not completely identify it, to not pin it down. I'm going broad spectrum here!

The bark of Live Oak is very pale brown and is vertically furrowed except for the big furrowed areas which look a lot like broken asphalt. The leaves are a bright deep green, and are thin oval shaped (when young) and mostly oval with the suggestion of horns (when grown). Like other oaks the leaves appear to grow in sets of five (now I feel like doing a little song and dance number about how nature comes in Fibonacci).
The young Live Oak is taller than it's wide, but the mature Live Oak is very distinctive in that it's frequently as wide (or wider) than it is tall. If you've ever seen a movie set in the south that has a tree that has truck-sized HUGE low horizontal branches that sweep upward after a while... that's a Live Oak.


*Yes, a lot of this information you can get on Wikipedia. In fact that where I've been starting for these last posts, but just like with research papers I use it as a good place to find more solid online sources.
Live Oak Information and Pictures

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