Will white oak cross with red oak?
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have 5 hybrid hazelnuts freebies from arbor day. the 2 oldest ones produce about 50 nuts per bush. the other 3 are only 1 yr old. got 8 bags of oak leaves from a friend that i put in my compost last spring. 3 weeks ago as i was turning my pile i noticed a oak seedling growing next to my pile. its about a ft. tall. theyâre not native this far north so its a special find! put some mulch around it and am watering it occasionally. not sure what species of oak it is. i also have several bushes of native beaked hazelnuts growing on my property. i give them a shovelful of compost and they produce lots of small nuts. the trick is to pick them ripe before the dang squirrels get emâ!
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I donât think so, but not sure. My plant books talk about the white oak group crossing but they donât say the reds donât. For my purposes, I donât usually worry beyond identifying white or red, so I may not have paid attentionâŚ
The bur/overcup was a pretty straightforward cross to infer. It looks like a bur (prickly cap), but comes 90% of the way over the nut like an overcup. Plus we are right at the intersection of the two speciesâs ranges.
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The fun oak ID challenge is pin oak vs. Hillâs oak vs. scarlet oak. Man those are hard to tell the difference⌠I certainly have no idea.
We call the bottom-land red oaks here pin oak but they could be Hillâs oak too⌠the natives here are much prettier in fall than the pin oaks from the southern nurseries that are shipped up and planted in folks yards. The natives take a nice red color, and the cultivated ones almost always go straight to brown.
Here is an interesting excerpt::
In the era of DNAbased taxonomy, hybridization has been demonstrated numerous times using chloroplast and nuclear data (Whittemore and Schaal 1991, Dumolin-Lapegue et al. 1997, Curtu et al. 2007, Cavender-Bares and Pahlich 2009). For this reason, oaks have been described by two leaders in the field of speciation as a âworst case scenario for the biological species conceptâ (Coyne and Orr 2004, p. 43). Our understanding of the depth and orientation of genetic boundaries, our concepts of what constitutes a plant species, and our ability to differentiate morphologically similar species are tangled up in the oaks.
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Where i hike along the bluffs near LaCrosse it seems the forest is mostly red oak, but my guess is there is white oak in there too.
My bur oak held its leaves all winter the last 2 winters. Highly annoying.
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