White Oaks 307 
Although not entirely immune, they are remarkably free frorn insect 
trouble and disease. The foliage of most oaks has a long period and 
continues to hang on in the dry condition, or, in the case of exotics, 
green into the winter. 
The great variety of outline and of pleasing leaf shapes and leaf 
colors, with rich tones in autumn, the sturdiness of growth and stateli- 
ness of form, the freedom from disease, the easy adaptation to soil, 
the wide climatic range, the rapidity and persistency of growth, and 
the ease of repairing damage — all these qualities combine to make the 
oaks, together with the maples, the most useful trees in landscape 
gardening. Most of them are spreading in habit, with a bold, free, and 
usually irregular, outline. For best effects they demand large space. 
Botanically as well as from the ornamental point of view, the oaks 
may be divided into four groups. The “white” oaks, which mature 
their fruit in one year, receive their name from the light gray color of 
their bark, and have their foliage with rounded indentations or lobes. 
The ‘‘black” oaks, which mature their fruit in two years, have a dark- 
colored bark, and their leaves with sharp-cornered indentations or 
lobes, or else entire and bristle-pointed, and a few with entire oblong 
foliage. In addition to these two botanical classes we may segregate 
the evergreen or “‘live” oaks, which botanically belong mostly to the 
white oaks, although their foliage resembles more the black oaks; and 
the “ scrub” oaks, which, mostly with black oak foliage, form spread- 
ing shrubs. ‘These latter grow on the poorest, driest soils, and can be 
used for covering barren, rocky ridges and hillsides. 
A. WHITE OAKS 
Q. alba Linn. (285) is the type White Oak, a noble tree, of wide 
distribution from Maine to Texas, the finest specimen tree where full 
space is allowed it. Nothing more impressive can be imagined than a 
fuily developed, broad-crowned specimen of this species. The bright 
green foliage of narrow, obtusely lobed leaves is quite variable in differ- 
ent individuals, turning violet-purple in the fall. The bark is light 
gray and flaky. It isa fairly rapid grower, adapted to any soil, but best 
developed in good loam. 
Foliage of similar outline, but longer (five to eight inches), and 
more lyre-shaped, also whitish beneath, is characteristic of the follow- 
ing three: 
