Quercus coccinea Seeds | Scarlet Oak
LATIN NAME: Quercus coccinea
COMMON NAME: Scarlet Oak, Oak
Plant Profile
Most trees turn colour well only when autumn is damp and cool, but a scarlet oak on a thin ridge soil will go crimson even in a dry season, and that reliability is why the species was taken into parks and streets far outside its native range. The Latin epithet records the same quality, since coccinea means scarlet.
An acorn needs two growing seasons to ripen, so a branch in late summer holds the current year’s green acorns behind the ones that will fall in autumn. The cup encloses a third to a half of the nut and is covered in tight, slightly hairy scales. The crop is heavy in some seasons and light in others, so a good mast autumn draws deer, wild turkeys and jays to the same ridge. Blue jays carry acorns away and bury them, which is how the species colonises ground its own seedlings could not reach.
Scarlet oak occupies dry, acid ridges that most hardwoods avoid, and it thrives there. Its deep taproot reaches water that shallower-rooted trees cannot. Fire has shaped those ridges for millennia: a burned or cut stump sends up vigorous shoots from the base, so a stand that looks destroyed after a ground fire can regenerate from the root collar. The trade-off is that older trees on thin soil decline in a run of droughts, a process foresters call oak decline.
Acorns are the currency of an eastern hardwood forest, and this oak pays in quantity rather than in flavour. Nearly every mammal and large bird in the wood eats them, and the tree’s habit of cropping heavily at intervals, rather than moderately every year, is thought to swamp the animals that eat the crop so that some seed always survives.
Where the two species meet, they cross, and the hybrid between scarlet oak and northern red oak has been formally named. Such trees sit between their parents in leaf shape and in bud, and they turn up wherever the ranges overlap. The white oak group and the red oak group do not cross with each other, so a scarlet oak will never hybridise with a white oak beside it. The genus as a whole carries twenty-four chromosomes, a count that has stayed stable across the oaks despite the ease with which the species cross.
Science & Biotechnology
Where permeability does not matter, the wood has few equals among temperate hardwoods for the price. It saws and machines well, takes a stain and a clear finish, and goes into flooring, furniture frames, pallets, railway ties and fence posts, with the poorer lengths burned for fuel or cut into charcoal. The bark and the acorns are loaded with tannins, the same compounds that make an unripe acorn bitter, and the inner bark was once used in tanning and in dyes.
Uses & Benefits
Red oaks and white oaks split a market on the basis of microscopic anatomy. White oak heartwood fills its vessels with tyloses, balloon-like growths that block the pores and make the wood watertight, which is why barrels are made from it. The red oaks, this species among them, lay down almost none, so the timber is permeable and unsuitable for tight cooperage, even though it is every bit as strong.
Growing from Seed
Its leaves are deeply cut into seven to nine lobes, each ending in a fine bristle, and they are glossy above and paler beneath, which separates the species from the northern red oak whose larger, duller leaves are cut less deeply. The bristle tip is the sign of the red oak section, a group in which the leaf veins run past the lobe margin and harden into a point. Scarlet oak also carries a small reddish-brown terminal bud only a few millimetres long and faintly downy, whereas the black oak beside it in the same woods has a large grey bud that is densely hairy and impossible to confuse with it once seen.
Sow acorns as soon as they fall, because they lose viability if they are allowed to dry out; test them by dropping them into water and discarding the ones that float. Use a deep pot, since the seedling makes a long taproot before it makes leaves, and fill it with two parts loam-based compost, one part coarse sand and a little leaf mould. Lay each acorn on its side about twenty-five millimetres deep, water it in, and leave the pot in a cold frame outdoors through the winter so the seed is chilled naturally; protect the surface from squirrels and mice with mesh, because they will find it.
A scarlet oak transplants badly because of that taproot, so move the seedling into its final position as young as you dare, ideally when it is no more than about sixty centimetres tall,. Plant it so the root collar sits at the level of the surrounding soil, stake only if the site is exposed, and water it deeply through its first three summers; once established the tree tolerates drought. Space permanent trees at least six metres apart, mulch over a wide circle without touching the trunk, and feed nothing, since an oak on a rich diet produces soft growth and weak wood. Prune only dead or crossing branches in winter, and watch for the galls and leaf miners that moth and wasp larvae raise on the foliage; the damage is rarely serious.
Our Take
Give this oak a big garden, a dry slope or a broad verge, and start it from acorns in a deep pot so the taproot is never disturbed. Growers who want the same red-oak timber on a wetter, easier site should compare the pin oak, Quercus palustris, and where a faster, larger tree is wanted the northern red oak, Quercus rubra, is the usual choice. For a woodland planting with the same wildlife value, the American chestnut, Castanea dentata, belongs in the same ground, though it needs the blight-resistant lines to survive.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Scarlet Oak: