Quercus aliena Seeds | Oriental White Oak
LATIN NAME: Quercus aliena
COMMON NAME: Oriental White Oak
Plant Profile
The oriental white oak is a deciduous tree of twenty metres with large obovate leaves that have wavy, blunt teeth and a soft grey underside. The acorns are short and squat, ripening in one season, and they sit in a cup covered with thin appressed scales.
It grows in China, Korea and Japan, on deep soils in mixed forest, and it is one of the parents of the oak woods that cover the hills of Shaanxi and Henan. In the open it makes a broad round crown and lives for two or three centuries. The bark is grey and furrowed, and the winter buds are covered in red-brown hairs, a character that helps identify the species in a mixed stand.
Science & Biotechnology
The species belongs to the white oak group, whose acorns mature in a single year and whose leaves lack the bristle tips of the red oaks. That group is also the one whose wood is closed by tyloses, the outgrowths that make a white oak barrel watertight, and the same anatomy makes the timber slower to dry.
Oriental white oak hybridises with Mongolian oak and with the Japanese oak wherever their ranges touch, and the swarms are extensive enough that foresters use leaf shape and acorn cup rather than any single character. Acorn crops are heavy every three to five years, and the intervening years are poor, a rhythm that drives wild boar populations.
Uses & Benefits
The wood is hard, heavy and pale, used for flooring, for furniture and for the handles of tools. In China it is also cut for mushroom logs, since the logs hold moisture and the bark is thick enough to protect the spawn.
Acorns are eaten after leaching, ground into a starch that is made into jelly in Korea and into noodles in parts of China. The tannins have to be removed with repeated changes of water, and the resulting starch is bland but filling. The cupules and bark were used for tanning leather. The wood also makes good charcoal, and the offcuts are burned for fuel in the same districts where the acorns are gathered.
Growing from Seed
Collect acorns as soon as they fall and sow them in autumn, since they die if they dry out. Sow two centimetres deep in deep pots, because the taproot goes down before the shoot comes up, and keep the pots outdoors through winter.
Plant out at one or two years, before the taproot has had time to coil in the pot. The tree needs full sun and room for its roots, and it competes badly with grass in the first three years, so keep a clear circle of mulch. Expect a crop of acorns after fifteen years, not before.
Our Take
A big oak for a big garden, good for timber, for mushroom logs and for acorns, and not a tree for a suburban plot. Plant it where it can stay.
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