Blackjack Oak
Oak Tree Acorns Oak Leaves Oak Tree Leaf. Thank you for visiting these Oak Tree Pictures, please come back soon for more great tree pictures! Oak Tree Comments. Oak Tree: Great shade tree to sit under on hot summer days, almost feels the temperature is dropped 5-10 degrees less. Mature oak tree can grow quite tall at 40-50 feet plus so do not. This tree is usually a small understory tree where I live. The leaves resemble water oak but are wider. The two are often confused. Blackjack oak is quite tolerant of shade and grows slowly. It seems to sporadically occur and never forms pure stands. Neutral: On Dec 24, 2004, TREEHUGR from Now in Orlando, FL (Zone 9b) wrote.
OTHER COMMON NAMES: BLACKJACK, BARRON OAK, JACK OAK, BLACK OAK
BOTANICAL NAME: Quercus marilandica KWEAR-cus mar-ah-LAN-di-cah
FAMILY: Fagaceae (Beech Family)
TYPE: Deciduous shade tree
HEIGHT: 50 to 60 feet
SPREAD: 30 to 40 feet
FINAL SPACING: 30 to 40 feet
NATURAL HABITAT AND PREFERRED SITE: Eastern half of Texas especially in the sandy acid soils. There is a western form of blackjack that grows only to 30 feet and can grow in sand or gravel, clay soils that are only slightly acidic.
IDENTIFICATION INFORMATION: Rounded symmetrical tree with club-like leaves and very dark heavily textured bark. Stiff in overall appearance.
FLOWERS AND FRUIT: Flowers appear with the leaves in the spring as slender hairy yellowish-green catkins 2 to 4 inches long. The fruit is an acorn that ripens in 2 years, either solitary or in pairs.
BARK: Dark brown to almost solid black, broken into rough block-like plates, heavy texture and usually very dark in color.
FOLIAGE: Leaves are simple, alternate, deciduous and club- shaped. Fall color is yellow but not a knockout.
CULTURE: For the most part blackjack oak needs sandy acid soil to survive. Does not do well in the black and white soils of north Texas. It is drought tolerant and needs very little fertilization.
PROBLEMS: Does not do well in the alkaline clay soils.
PROPAGATION: From acorns planted in the soil immediately after releasing from the tree in the fall.
INSIGHT: Blackjack oak is said to indicate poor soil areas. It is rarely cultivated because it is difficult to transplant.
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Blackjack Oak
Latin: Quercus marilandica
This summer’s drought has been tough on trees. The drive between Fayetteville and Little Rock is punctuated with whole hillsides of brown and seemingly lifeless trees.
While these trees - mostly oaks, hickories, dogwoods and elms - look bad from a distance, most will survive the rigors of the 2000 drought without much problem. Summers like this help one appreciate the really tough trees such as the blackjack oak.
A kid I knew in my youth was scrappy and always getting into fights. His favorite saying was, 'When you’re ugly you gotta be tough.' Mother Nature has applied this simple truism to the blackjack oak because it is one ugly, but tough tree.
Blackjacks are found throughout most of the eastern woodlands, occupying sites with soil too poor or dry for oaks with more stature and substance to flourish. It was one of the few tree species to venture onto the Great Plains before white settlement, occupying a region from central Texas northeast through Oklahoma known as the cross timber region.
The blackjack is a small, gnarly tree usually under 35 feet tall with a round crown and leathery, three-lobed leaves. It is a member of the red oak tribe and has the characteristic leaf spine at the end of each lobe. The leaves hang on the tree through the winter to be pushed off by new leaves the following spring. It’s trunk is often deeply furrowed and black, giving it a brooding wintertime appearance.
The Rodney Dangerfield of oaks, blackjacks are given but one use - firewood - by most authors who seem overly hung up on the notion that all oaks reach the pinnacle of their glory at the saw mill.
It might be instructive to speculate on the long term effects of this summer’s drought on the survival and health of the forest. As bad as the trees look, most will survive the drought because they have been forced into an early dormancy to conserve water.
Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. The oaks of our eastern forest are systemically infected with a fungus called Hypoxylon canker - sort of the athlete’s foot of the oak kingdom.
Survey work conducted by Dr. Pat Finn at the UofA following the severe drought of 1980 showed that about 80 percent of the oaks of northwest Arkansas have this systemic infection. This fungus is usually benign and does no apparent harm, but droughts cause it to flare up. Certain trees -- with no discernable pattern -- are killed by the multiplying hyphae of the fungus as it produces its spores on fungal mats under the bark of the tree. These fungal mats push the bark off which accumulates at the base of the tree like a rain of deadly dandruff.
For the health of the forest, Hypoxylon is a beneficial fungus because it thins the stand of trees. In 1980, the disease killed about 12 percent of the oaks in some areas, thus allowing the survivors more opportunity to obtain water.
Unfortunately most of us that build our homes in the woodland have difficulty taking the long view on ecology when the tree in front of our house is the one that dies. About all that can be done to ward off the effects of this problem is to keep the drought at bay by watering before conditions become too severe.
Blackjacks are not in the nursery trade and many who have them on their property treat them with little respect. But, before dismissing this tough tree as a scrub oak and relegating it to the woodpile, reflect on its toughness and adaptability under adverse conditions.
By: Gerald Klingaman, retired
Extension Horticulturist - Ornamentals
Extension News - September 22, 2000
Blackjack Oak Tree Leaves
Blackjack Oak Tree Leaves Pictures
Blackjack Tree Leaves
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