Someone slipped a different oak into what I thought was a stand of 100% shumard

[Lanier_Lurker]

This tree made the first acorn crop I have seen it make this year.  It is part of a group of 8 trees in an urban ornamental planting that I thought were all shumard oaks.

These acorns do not look like shumard acorns to me.

I have an idea of what kind of oak this is, but want to check with the Forum folks to be sure.

[WDH]

Black oak.  Should be some hairiness on the leaf underside, especially in the junction of the veins.  Is that what you were thinking?

[Lanier_Lurker]

No, that is not what I was thinking.

I went back and looked at the leaves and there is no hairiness on the underside.

It is possible that this is some sort of hybrid I suppose.

[WDH]

If it is a planted ornamental and not a wild tree, it might not behave like it should ;D.

[Lanier_Lurker]

Well, the cups surely don't look right for shumard.  Also, these acorns are much smaller than the shumard acorns.  They do look more like black than scarlet.

The next time I go to this location I will scrape the bark and check the color.

[Dodgy Loner]

My first impression is that it is a Nuttall oak (Quercus texana, formerly known as Quercus nuttallii).

[climbncut]

I'm going to guess black oak also.  Is the cup of the acorn fuzzy? Did the leaves on the tree appear more waxy (cuticle) than the shumards?

[SwampDonkey]

There can be a difference in morphology of shade vs full sun grown leaves. It's possible the leaves are hairless in shade. Maybe?

Without a fringed cup like our black oaks have, I would just call it a northern red oak.

[WDH]

Dodgy,

You may be right. 

LL, the bark on black oak will be rougher and darker while the bark on nuttall will be smoother and lighter.  What does the bark look like?  I need to look up the difference in the acorns when I get back to my reference books.

[Dodgy Loner]

I know of a big Nuttall oak on the UGA campus and a row of smaller ones at a parking lot at the UGA botanical gardens. Ironically, the ones at the bot. gardens were mislabeled as Shumard oaks for several years until my dendrology professor convinced them they were actually Nuttalls. LL's acorns are a match. Here is a picture I found:

[Jeff]

Lanier_Lurker we've went over this before, thus the public posting. You just used up well over 100k of forum server space trying to be tricky with your photo when at the same time, I used one fifth of the space to do represent the same thing, same size, below.  Please stick to the photo posting limits for size, as they are there for a reason. Several reasons in fact.





Besides the less than frugal use of space and slow download (like I have right now since I am limited to a cellphone connection this week), when people are looking for information in our photo gallery or google, instead of the picture above, they get unhelpful crap like this:



or this

[letemgrow]

Is it a cherrybark oak possibly??

[WDH]

No I don't think so.  I am with Dodgy in the nuttall oak camp.  If it was cherrybark, the underside of the leaf would be a different color than the topside, kind of a chartuese/light tan.

[Brian Beauchamp]

How old are these trees? If this tree is producing very young, that would indicate to me that it could be a hybrid. The characteristics indicate to me that it may be a cross between Shumard and Pin or Nuttall.

...or it could be a pure strain of one of the 3 that is just showing atypical characteristics.

[WDH]

All bets are off when they are planted from a nursery versus plants growing in the wild. 

[rambo]

Scarlet oak.