Search Results - Field Guide

Chinkapin oak is fairly easy to identify because of its distinctively toothed leaves. Look for it growing in rocky soils derived from limestone or dolomite on bluffs and in upland woods, and in floodplain forests and lower slopes along streams.

Swamp chestnut oak grows in Missouri's Bootheel swamps. The leaves look something like those of true chestnut trees.

Shumard oak is worth knowing: it can rise to 100 feet in height and gain a trunk diameter of 5 feet, with wide-spreading, muscular boughs.

The dwarf chestnut oak, though only 3–10 feet tall and the shortest of Missouri's oaks, can nevertheless produce abundant acorns that are relished by several types of birds and mammals.

A beautiful tree, swamp white oak features bicolored leaves that are shiny, dark green above and downy white below. When a breeze sets them in motion, their wavy or lobed shapes add a calm grace to a summer's hike.

This tree has two names as well as two leaf types! In Missouri, southern red oak, or Spanish oak, occurs natively only in our southeast and southernmost counties.

Black oak grows throughout Missouri, in upland woods, on glades, and along borders of woods and fields. It and scarlet oak were the primary colonizers of Ozark pinelands when the native pines were cleared in the early 1900s.

The bark of cherrybark oak looks like the bark of a cherry tree. When you hold one of the leaves with the leaf stalk upward, the pointed lobes make the leaf resemble an outline of a Chinese pagoda. This oak grows in Missouri's Bootheel.

In Missouri, Nuttall's oak grows naturally only in Bootheel. With its limited range, and with steady destruction of its habitat, it has become rare and imperiled within our borders.