Second oak planted
March 12, 2023
With a fair amount of effort, MH helped me dig up this oak, which he thought was some kind of red oak, from his place and move to ours. I was originally going to bonsai it, and so had cut it at about 12 or 15" tall about two(?) years prior. It grew back amazingly fast to be about 6 or 7 feet tall when we put it in.
In early October 2025, I did some research on what type it may be. Using the book (that MH let me borrow or maybe gave to me - memory is not clear) Trees of the Eastern and Central United States and Canada by William M. Harlow (Dover Publications, 1957), I narrowed it down to one of three trees in the red oak group: black oak (quercus velutina), northern (common) red oak (quercus ruba), or scarlet oak (quercus coccinea). This was based mostly on the leaf, by tracing various characteristics through his numbering system, from 1 to 9 to 11 to 12 to 13 to ... not sure. I think I need to wait for it to get a bit older and use acorns or bark to get to the final identification. Leaf color in fall might help, but I don't think I'll be able to tell myself from that.
The White Oak Initiative (ironically) has some guides for those trees that were useful in at least suggesting I was on the right track. So was "Northern Red Oak vs Black Oak" from bplant.org.
Follow-up posts: