SILVICAL CHARACTERISTICS. 7 



The chestnutlike leaves are from 2 to 5 inches long and are borne 

 on short petioles. The teeth are small and scattered. Sometimes 

 the margin is entire near the base or even for its whole extent, 

 especially on narrow-leaved forms. This variation in leaf form 

 sometimes leads woodsmen to speak of "two kinds of tanbark oak." 

 Both surfaces of the leaf, especially the lower, are covered with a 

 thick, light-colored, dusty fuzz, which gives the foliage a distinctive 

 hue. 



The flowers, which appear in July or August, often conceal the 

 foliage with a mass of grayish-white blossoms. The acorns are 

 from f inch to 1J inches long, and from f to 1 inch broad, and coated 

 with a brown fuzz. The somewhat burrlike but shallow cup is 

 covered with long and narrow scales. 



The bark of the trunk of adult trees is usually from 1 to 3 inches 

 thick, and sometimes from 4 to 5 inches; it is brown, smooth on 

 the surface, but so fissured longitudinally and transversely as to 

 produce elongated, irregularly rectangular plates. On the main 

 limbs and on young trunks the bark is very smooth, little fissured, 

 if at all, white, gray, or mottled, and often strikingly similar to the 

 bark of red alder. 



RANGE AND OCCURRENCE. 



The range of tanbark oak extends from a little north of the 

 Umpqua River in southwestern Oregon through the coast ranges to 

 Santa Barbara in California, and from the Humboldt region eastward 

 by way of the Shasta Mountains to the Sierra Nevada, and along 

 that range as far south as El Dorado County. 



In general, though not always, tanbark oak grows either with 

 redwood or in the neighborhood of the redwood belt. It is an 

 associate of redwood in all the great redwood areas and even in the 

 isolated bodies or tongues in the range of that tree. The greatest 

 forests of redwood are in Mendocino and Humboldt Counties, and 

 in those counties tanbark oak attains its best development. (PL II.) 

 Tanbark oak is not at its best, however, in the heart of the redwood 

 forests, but in the belts which border them. The principal body of 

 tanbark oak forms a band along the inland side of the redwood belt 

 and covers the "Bald Hills." The general term "Bald Hills" 

 is a widely used folk name for the inland portion of the seaward Coast 

 Range, that much-broken mountain range which parallels the coast 

 and separates the ocean from such valleys as those of Santa Rosa, 

 Alexander, and Ukiah^nd the narrow canyon of the main Eel River 

 in its long course from Little Lake Valley northward to Humboldt. 



The higher inner ridges and summits and the interior slopes are 

 covered by a mixed forest forming the tanbark oak belt along the 

 whole length of the main redwood body. In southern Humboldt, 



