Chapter 10

Naming the Trees

I have an embarrassing confession to make. Years ago I was one of the editors of a book titled Trees for the Yard, Orchard, and Woodlot (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1976) that has a dreadful mistake in it. I want so badly to exempt myself from blame by saying it happened in a chapter I didn’t work on directly, but I have a notion I would have overlooked the error anyway. There were people working on the book much more knowledgeable about trees than I, and they didn’t catch it either. On page 258, there is a description of chinquapin oak that is pure malarkey: “Because of its small size, the wood of this species is only of moderate importance, even though similar to white oak in quality. What wood that is lumbered goes into construction work. The acorns are reputed to be sweeter than any other oak.”

The first sentence of that description is dead wrong. Chinquapin oak grows to a huge size. I’ve been frequenting a grove of them for over thirty years now. Some of these trees tower just as tall and wide as any of our white oaks. The second sentence of the description is a dead giveaway that it was copied out of some old publication or was copied from a book that copied it from an old publication. Eighty years ago it was customary to attach to the description of almost any species of tree some reference as to its importance or lack thereof in construction because in earlier days there was a possibility that almost any wood might find its way into a building. But chinquapin oak is scarce, and if you can find a board of it in any house or barn built in the last thirty years, I’ll buy you a steak dinner at the restaurant of your choice.

The third sentence of the description is true but only by accident.

The description actually belongs to the chinquapin, not the chinquapin oak, although it is not very helpful for that tree either. We editors just got our paragraphs misplaced. The real fault or confusion in this matter lies in the haphazard way we humans name trees. The chinquapin tree is a member of the chestnut family, and someone many long years ago decided it was appropriate to hang the name on an oak species because it has an acorn sweeter than any other acorn and almost as sweet as a chinquapin chestnut. The chinquapin is a small tree, and it would indeed have limited construction use. The erroneous description did get the Latin name right for chinquapin oak: Quercus muehlenbergii. But while Latin names are touted as a way to avoid the confusion of ever-changing colloquial names, obviously it didn’t help in this case.

The situation just gets messier because there is another tree called the golden chinquapin that grows only along the Pacific Coast. It is not exactly a chestnut but a relative, Castanopsis chrysophylla. Aren’t you so glad you asked? The chinquapin of the middle United States is Castanea pumila.

Before Google, I used the 1947 Yearbook of Agriculture volume Trees to identify the various species, but it is somewhat outdated today. By some strange quirk, this authoritative source does not even list the chinquapin, only chinquapin oak and golden chinquapin—and has little to say about either. My other reference book, worn out from my constant thumbing, is an old edition of the usually reliable Taylor’s Encyclopedia of Gardening. It has chinquapin described correctly, but there is no listing at all for chinquapin oak! It lists thirty different kinds of oak and even includes a few old Latin names that have been superseded by new Latin names—another reason that using the Latin labels can be just as confusing as using colloquial ones. To make the whole affair look even more like some conspiracy, Tree Crops, J. Russell Smith’s classic book on trees that champions the use of acorns for food, gives only one sentence in the whole book to chinquapin oak, the oak with the most promising acorn for this purpose.

I get a little overwrought by this because the chinquapin oak really does produce the sweetest acorns of all American oaks, including the California white oak, which was once a major food source for Native Americans on the West Coast. Chinquapin oak acorns do not need to be soaked and strained in water to get rid of the bitter tannin, or at least not soaked nearly as much as other acorns. Chinquapin oak acorns are not as tasty as hickory nuts or walnuts but, even raw, are tannin-free enough that they surely would be much more economical for flour or meal for humans or livestock than other acorns. It would seem to me, although I haven’t tried cooking with any acorns, that here we have a possible replacement for American chestnut, which was so important in Appalachian diets before the chestnut blight came along. Why does it seem to have been ignored?

At first I thought maybe chinquapin oaks did not bear heavily enough to be practical as a staple food source, but watching ours, they bear a crop quite like white oaks do, which is to say about every other, or every third year, and then they bear heavily. The only drawback, which only proves the acorn’s worth, is that the wild animals go after it with great devotion. They know a good thing when they taste it, and if you don’t get there early in the season you won’t get any at all.

We need to give the chinquapin oak a new colloquial name. Call it sweet oak maybe.

When we writers start levitating in awe about trees, we often tend to do it on the basis of bookish research rather than actual field experience. We can’t know as much about all of them as we would like, so it is easy for us to make mistakes. After several generations of copying each other’s book knowledge, the errors feed on themselves and multiply. Had I not wandered accidentally under an oak tree whose leaves looked different from other oak trees in our neighborhood, and then tasted one of its acorns, I would never have realized the error in the book mentioned above. Even then, that first time, I learnedly pronounced the tree to be a chestnut oak, which it slightly resembles. Fortunately again, I already had planted a chestnut oak in my own grove, and when I compared the acorns and leaves, they were not alike at all. Even finely wrought book drawings of the two species can be confusing if not compared to the real thing. Chestnut oak acorns are larger and lighter colored. Sweet (chinquapin) oak acorns are medium-sized and a deep and attractive maroon brown.

Another mystery of the sweet oak grove, which is on property my son and his wife and other members of her family own, is that these trees are not at all common in our county. How did these get here?

I can make up a story that I am almost certain is true, based on studying the archaeology of Native American culture and agriculture. As I pointed out earlier, before Europeans came here, the Indians managed the forests much more than historians used to think. Some of my son’s sweet oaks are 150 to 180 years old, surely, comparing their size to white oaks I have felled and ring-counted. It is highly likely that the people living here back then, and earlier, cleared a space in the forest with fire, because oaks won’t grow in primeval forest shade, and planted sweet oak trees that they knew bore acorns that could be roasted right off the tree into a delicious meal. If these trees were not deliberately planted, how can a grove of them here and nowhere else in the neighborhood be explained? Lending credence to this supposition, sweet oak, that is, chinquapin oak, has been found outside its natural range, a fact that has mystified foresters. I theorize that prehistoric communities carried the acorns away and deliberately planted them in new places.

Some younger sweet oaks are growing up around the old ones, and that is very fortunate because deer and squirrel populations are growing by leaps and bounds (literally), and there’s not much chance of a sweet acorn escaping them right now. I have gotten one tree started here in our home grove, so I am hopeful that I have continued sweet oak trees in this area for at least another two hundred years. The only reason I have not planted more is that it has taken me so long to work my way through my case of mistaken identity and understand the food value of this tree.

Today it is a bit easier to name trees because of search engines like Google. They leave no leaf unturned in their lists, descriptions, and pictures of trees. What really enhances this way of identifying trees is that you can take your cell phone or iPad into the woods with you and compare pictures and descriptions with the real leaf, bark, blooms, and seeds at hand. I have been spending a considerable amount of time lately trying to tell the difference between white (American) elm and red or slippery elm in my groves. Even though I am quite familiar with both, distinguishing them is not easy. Here is a description of white elm from Wikipedia: “Elm leaves are alternate, with simple, single- or most commonly, doubly serrate margins, usually asymmetric at the base and acuminate at the apex. The genus is hermaphroditic, having apetalous perfect flowers which are wind-pollinated, although bees do visit them. The fruit is a round wind-dispersed samara flushed with chlorophyll, facilitating photosynthesis before the leaves emerge.” Unless a person has gone to graduate school for forty years or so to learn the language of botany, such a description might as well be written in Greek for all the help it can give in identifying white elm. Fortunately, that kind of Rosetta stone prose is accompanied by photographs and drawings. Even then, finding an illustration that exactly matches the trees in my woods is not easy. I’ve learned that I must examine leaf, or bud, or bark in minute detail, then compare those tiny details carefully with the pictures, always bearing in mind that some of the pictures might be mistakenly labeled.

Sometimes the name of the tree gives clues to its identity, but only in certain situations. A white (American) elm is so named because the wood is light colored and also to distinguish it from red elm, which has dark reddish wood. But the only way you can discern wood coloring is to saw into the wood. That doesn’t help if you are looking at live, growing trees you don’t want to injure.

Red elm is often called slippery elm because the bark on the inside is coated with a glutinous sap. But again, you can only see the slipperiness by cutting up a log.

If you study the seeds (called fruit if you are a botanist), the white elm seed is about the size of a little fingernail and slightly oblong, while the red elm seed is a little larger and rounder. But when you are in the woods, examining an elm seed, it is very hard to determine which one you are looking at unless you have samples of both at hand.

Verbal descriptions of bark are almost useless in identification, unless the bark configuration really is unique. A shagbark hickory has very shaggy strips of bark dangling off the trunk so you can hardly mistake it. But for most of the hardwoods, trying to use words to describe the bark is not helpful. Here’s some from the book Trees, cited above.

“Bark gray with deep, diamond-shaped fissures and narrow, forked ridges.”

“Bark gray, scaly or fissured.”

“Bark gray, separated into thin scales.”

“Bark gray, irregularly furrowed into flat ridges.”

Those bark descriptions above are for white ash, black ash, yellow buckeye, and mockernut hickory, respectively, but are of no help at all in identifying an actual tree in the forest. Even when the color, fissures, forks, plates, and ridges are more or less described accurately, the tree scout has no way of knowing when deep fissures become shallow fissures, or when narrow forked ridges turn into irregularly furrowed flat ridges. And a lot will depend upon whether the tree trunk is from an old tree or a young tree of the same species. Also, bark of the same tree differs slightly in different climates. Red oak bark in northern Ohio looks somewhat different from red oak bark in Kentucky. And if you can distinguish northern red oak from scarlet oak from Shumard oak by looking at the bark only, you are a master tree watcher indeed.

I have only in the last year been able to distinguish accurately between mature white oak and black oak because, under certain conditions, the bark sometimes looks about the same, depending on the age of the tree and how the light hits the tree. The shade of gray and the checkering can look almost the same, especially when I’m hoping that the tree is a white oak, which sells for much more money. So my judgment is biased from the start. I will point out what I want to believe is a big, veneer-quality white oak, not a black oak, and my timber buyer will stare at me almost pathetically and correct me, as he has done many times. Of course, once the trunk is cut into, the difference is obvious because black oak wood has a deep maroon color and white oak a light color.

The only tree easy to identify by the bark is the black walnut. If you suspect that you are looking at this species, shave off a thin slice of the bark with a pocket knife. The bared surface under the outer skin of bark will be very dark brown if the tree is a black walnut. In all other hardwoods that I know, the shaved surface will be lighter colored than the bark.

Leaves are by and large the best way to identify a tree. For example, the leaf lobes of the white oak family are rounded, but in the black oak family they are pointed. This is always true in my experience. However, if the time is winter, or the tree limbs are only high in the sky as is the case with a big tree, there may be no leaves around to make the proper identification.

In the long run, success in naming trees requires living in the woods or walking through them often, in company with someone who has learned the names of the trees from long experience. A timber buyer can be the best teacher. After about the twentieth time you have seen a white ash, you assimilate all the white ash details in your mind and you know what you are looking at almost by instinct.

You may have to learn several colloquial names for the same tree, with the probability that untutored but knowledgeable tree experts may use the same colloquial name for more than one tree. “Piss ellum” is a favorite name for slippery elm in the Rall family, because the copious sap under the bark has a slight odor of urine about it. But I have also heard white elm referred to that way, even though it isn’t as odoriferous.

What really makes tree identification difficult is the natural hybridization always going on in the woods and the amount of crossbreeding that tree scientists are doing. In the natural world of my woodland it is difficult to find two shagbark hickory trees that have exactly the same kind of nut. They vary in size, in shape, in thickness of shell, in the color of the shell, in the thickness and tightness of hull, in ease of extraction, in nutmeat size related to shell size, in taste, in how soon the tree comes into bearing, in earliness or lateness of maturity, and in whether the nuts fall readily in the fall or hang on into winter. That same variability holds true of shellbark hickory. To complicate matters even more, the two species may hybridize. Since the hickory and pecan are closely related, crosses between them, called “hicans,” must be taken in account also.

While all this natural crossing is going on in the hickory for example, humans have also been busy making crosses and developing improved varieties that they name, propagate, and sell. Then one must go through similar exercises in identification with the other, less palatable hickories: mockernut hickory, water hickory, red hickory, pignut hickory, nutmeg hickory, and bitternut hickory. We recently found a tree growing in the wild grove behind our daughter’s home that mystified us for a while. It turned out to be a bitternut hickory with foliage not much different from other hickories and even sort of like white ash, but with more of a smooth, tan bark than most other hickories. But it has one telltale detail uncharacteristic of other hickories. The leaf buds in late winter and early spring develop a distinctly yellow color.

All the hickories have colloquial names, and the same name often applies to more than one kind. Resorting to Latin names is not much help either, since scientists are constantly changing, dropping, or updating the names as they make new discoveries or develop new strains. My sisters’ way of identifying the hickories in Kerr’s Woods is perhaps the best solution. They give the individual trees that bear really choice nuts their own proper names. If they mention Long White, we all know exactly which tree is under discussion.

Tree watching can become just as enjoyable as bird watching and is easier to do, since the trees are not going to fly away before you get them in focus. Since there are about a hundred species that you could come across in almost any part of the country that is forested, you are not likely to run out of new ones to get excited about any time soon.