5*4 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 357. 



New or Little-known Plants. 



Quercus Texana. 



STUDENTS of our trees have long been puzzled by a 

 black Oak of the Mississippi valley with leaves like 

 those of the Scarlet Oak or of the Pin Oak in outline, and 

 fruit resembling in some of its forms the fruit of the Red 

 Oak. This tree, which is common in the neighborhood of 

 St. Louis, was well known to Dr. Engelmann, the best- 

 equipped and most experienced man who has made a sys- 

 tematic study of North American Oaks, and it usually 

 appears in his herbarium as Quercus rubra coccinifolia. or 

 as Quercus, n. sp., or as Quercus ambigua. He never 

 published, however, even a varietal name for this tree, but 

 under his remarks on Quercus rubra {Trans. Si. Louis Acad., 

 iii., 394) speaks of a form of that species which he consid- 

 ered one of the most variable of our eastern Oaks, with 

 "leaves similar to those of coccinea, with divaricate pin- 

 natifid lobes, or with leaves smaller and more deeply 

 divided, with fewer lobes, much like those of palustris ; 

 and acorns always smaller than in the typical rubra, 

 and the cup rather deeper.'' The description is a good one, 

 but he did not realize how widely this peculiar form was 

 distributed, and he had never had the opportunity to see 

 alive the Texas Red Oak, which at one time he referred to 

 Quercus palustris, and later considered a variety of the Red 

 Oak of the north. 



The first description of the Texas Oak appears in Torrey's 

 Botany of the Mexican Boundary Survey (page 206), pub- 

 lished in 1859, where it is described as Quercus coccinea, 

 var. (?) microcarpa, from specimens gathered by Dr. J. M. 

 Bigelow in rocky ravines near the mouth of the Pecos and 

 on the Limpio, in western Texas. It had been collected 

 about the same time by Charles Wright in south-western 

 Texas and at New Braunfels by Ferdinand Lindheimer, 

 whose specimens are preserved in the Engelmann herba- 

 rium ; and in the second volume of the Pacific Railroad 

 Reports, published in 1852, it had been called Quercus 

 palustris by Torrey and Gray, who certainly could never 

 have seen the fruit. In Hall's Plantse Texanse it was 

 named and distributed as Quercus palustris, and as Quercus 

 palustris it appears in Coulter's Manual of the Flora of 

 Western Texas (Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb.), published in 1S94. 

 Mr. S. B. Buckley, through his long residence in Austin, 

 had excellent opportunities to study in situ the Texas 

 flora, and in i860 described this tree in the Proceedings of 

 the Philadelphia Academy as Quercus Texana, and twenty 

 years later, in the same publication, referred it to Quercus 

 rubra as var. Texana, the name finally adopted by Dr. 

 Engelmann. 



Fifteen years ago I first saw the Texas Oak growing on 

 the banks of the Colorado River, near Austin, and at differ- 

 ent times I have seen it in other parts of the state, and long 

 ago felt sure that it could not be considered a form of our 

 northern Red Oak. During the past summer I had the 

 good fortune to pass a day with Dr. Schneck, at Mount 

 Carmel, Illinois, at the junction of the White and Wabash 

 rivers, one of the richest and most interesting tree regions 

 in North America, and it at once occurred to me that the 

 Swamp Red Oak of that country was identical with Buck- 

 ley's Quercus Texana. In company with Mr. Letterman I 

 saw the same tree a few days later upon the banks of the 

 Maramec River, in Missouri, and afterward revisited Austin 

 to refresh my memory of the Texas tree. These field ob- 

 servations and the subsequent examination of most of the 

 Oak material in American herbaria have confirmed my 

 impression that Engelmann's Quercus rubra coccinifolia 

 and Buckley's Quercus Texana are specifically the same, 

 and that the Texas Oak is one of the commonest and most 

 widely distributed trees of the Mississippi valley. 



As it grows in the basin of the lower Ohio River Quercus 

 Texana is a tall and noble tree. Dr. Ridgway, in his 

 Notes on the Native Trees of the Lower Wabash and While 

 River Valleys in Illinois and Indiana (Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., 



1882, 80), where this tree is referred to Quercus coccinea, 

 which does not, however, reach southern Illinois, speaks of 

 it as the tallest Oak of the region, and records the measure- 

 ment of a tree which had a total height of one hundred and 

 eighty-one feet, with a clean trunk ninety-four feet tall and 

 twenty feet three inches in circumference. The bark, 

 although rather darker, resembles that of the Red Oak ; 

 the winter-buds are those of the Red Oak, and the leaves 

 are hardly to be distinguished in outline, texture and in the 

 lustrous green of the upper surface, from those of Quercus 

 coccinea, but on the lower surface are furnished, like those 

 of Quercus palustris, with tufts of ferrugineous hairs in the 

 axils of the primary veins ; in the autumn they retain 

 their green color later than those of other Oaks in the 

 same region, and do not assume the brilliant colors 

 which late in the season make Quercus palustris and 

 Quercus coccinea so conspicuous. In shape the acorns 

 resemble those of Quercus rubra, although they are gen- 

 erally rather shorter and narrower, and the cup, instead of 

 being broad and shallow, is more or less turbinate, and its 

 scales are rather looser and are covered with pale pubes- 

 cence. Acorns which I gathered near Austin last Septem- 

 ber were quite pubescent and very distinctly striped, a 

 peculiarity I have not seen on acorns of this tree gathered 

 elsewhere. This striping on the acorns of Oaks is not, 

 however, a specific character that can be relied on, and in 

 other species the acorns are sometimes striped on certain 

 individuals and are not striped on others. 



As I know it, Quercus Texana is common in the neigh- 

 borhood of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. It occurs 

 at Waterloo, Iowa, in the neighborhood of Rockford, Illi- 

 nois, in southern Illinois and Indiana, and near Nashville, 

 Tennessee ; it is common from the neighborhood of St. 

 Louis, through Missouri, Arkansas and Texas ; it was col- 

 lected by Hale in Louisiana, probably in the neighborhood 

 of Shreveport, on the Red River, and large trees, evidently 

 of the original forest, are still standing on bottom-lands in 

 Carrollton, near New Orleans, where it is often planted as a 

 shade4ree in the streets. It appears to be the Red Oak of 

 Mississippi and Alabama, ranging as far east as Aspalaga, 

 in Florida, where it has been collected by Mr. A. H. Curtiss. 

 In the lower Ohio basin, Quercus Texana grows in 

 swamps or on the low and often inundated banks of 

 streams with Quercus palustris, Quercus lyrata, Quercus 

 bicolor, Quercus Michauxii, the Liquidambar, Nyssa syl- 

 vatica, Acer rubrum and Populus heterophylla. Any one driv- 

 ing through this region, or even traveling on the railroad, 

 can always distinguish it from the Red Oak by its lus- 

 trous foliage, although, without fruit, it cannot be distin- 

 guished from Quercus palustris, with which it is often 

 associated. I am told by Dr. Mohr and by Mr. Letterman 

 that it inhabits swamps in southern Missouri and Arkansas 

 and in the eastern Gulf states. Near Austin it grows on the 

 low, moist limestone hills rising above the Colorado River, 

 in company with Quercus Durandii and Juniperus occiden- 

 talis, but near San Antonio it grows in low wet bottom- 

 lands. 



Of the real value of the wood of this tree little is yet 

 known ; probably a considerable part of the so-called red 

 oak of lumbermen is derived from it, and it is certain that 

 all the red oak of the south, which is usually considered 

 more valuable than northern red oak, is from this species. 

 The Red Oak, Quercus rubra of Linna?us, which is the 

 most boreal of the Oaks of eastern America, probabty no- 

 where reaches the low coast region of the southern states. 

 Very common at the north and always an inhabitant of 

 uplands, where it usually selects rich and well-drained soil, 

 the Red Oak ranges southward along the Alleghany Moun- 

 tains to northern Georgia, where it is neither common nor 

 of large size, and westward to Minnesota, Nebraska, southern 

 Illinois, central Tennessee, Missouri and central Kansas. 

 Quercus palustris, for which the Texas Oak has so often been 

 mistaken, is also a northern species ; it grows in Virginia, a 

 few miles south of Washington, apparently its most southern 

 station in the Atlantic states, and in southern Indiana and 



