Willow Oak
Outside my office window, maybe at 1:30 to the right of my monitor, is a huge old tree planted long ago on Bessemer Drive. It is right there at the corner of Bessemer and North Elm. It’s about five feet in diameter, and though the crown of the tree is not healthy, there are still great huge limbs growing outward that are healthy, and it still provides much shade. My car sits under it’s shade even now as I write.
When I was a kid making money raking lawns, I confess I hated this tree. The leaves were so narrow that it took multiple passes of the rake to get them up. But what did I know, I was a kid. Now we have leaf blowers that sweep the little Willow Oak leaves up in no time flat. I hate the noise of leaf blowers. I’d rather get the exercise triple raking the old fashioned way.
Of course I am talking about that most popular of street shade trees, the Willow Oak, Quercus phellos.
“Phellos” you say? Yes, phellos is the Greek work for cork. Though the young Willow Oak has bark that is fairly smooth and grey, as the tree gets older, the bark becomes furrowed with fairly large vertical ridges. These ridges are somewhat “corky” in texture, hence the name.
You know the tree – darkish furrowed bark, small 2-3 inch long very narrow (“willowish”) leaves ending in a little bristle tip, and those tiny acorns that cover the ground all around. My favorite row of Willow Oaks in Greensboro, despite the damage done due to ice storms the past few years, remains that strip on Lawndale between Cornwallis and the new TargetShopping Center.
According to the Treasure Trees of Guilford County, 2005 booklet, the largest Willow Oak in GuilfordCounty is on the grounds of AycockMiddle School. Again, Willow Oaks make for excellent park, school yard, and street trees. The champion Willow Oak at AycockSchool comes in at 138 feet in height, 62.5 inches in diameter, with a crown spread of 84 feet. I don’t care what anybody says; that’s a big tree!
If you check out the more general article about the two kinds of oaks – the reds and the whites, well, the Willow Oak falls into the red oak category. The bristle tip gives it away, as does the darker bark, the hairy inner lining of the acorn shell (not the cup), and the fact that you can notice that the acorns take two years to develop on the tree. Just this big tree with narrow willow like leaves, and you’re probably thinking of a Willow Oak.
The Willow Oak is, more naturally, a bottomland tree, though it does not like swampy or overly wet soils. It tends to favor slightly moist soils, and grows largest is such environments. Yet, it is found also on mesic, or medium- moisture sites such as are common in the Piedmont. It is a shallow rooting tree. One of its distinguishing traits is that the root area at the bottom of the trunk will swell upward and outward, seeming to lift the whole tree as it were a foot or two in the air. It does not do well right next to sidewalks – or maybe better put, sidewalks don’t do too well right next to Willow Oaks. Neither do home foundations. Willow Oaks should not be planted too close to a house.
Because of the huge abundance of smallish acorns the Willow Oak is an important food tree for a great variety of birds and small mammals. For this reason their seeds are widely distributed. Though not thought of as an open field tree, because of this distribution you will often find Willow Oaks rising from cleared fields soon after the pines and sweet gums. But, because the Willow Oak grows not as tall as some of its oak brothers, or as grand as other forest trees, it is usually not found in the mature canopy of a climax forest.
The Willow Oak is not a spectacular fall tree, though given the right weather the leaves are capable of turning a lovely golden yellow. More often they turn an yellowish brown.
For most of us we will know and enjoy the Willow Oak as a planted street, park, or yard shade-tree. It grows rapidly for an oak, and before “sixteen years and sixteen summers gone now” will be providing shade for an otherwise sunny and blank yard or street.
I am thankful for whoever it was that looked into the future and imagined our Greensboro streets lined with mature Willow Oaks providing shade and beauty even in the warmest summer seasons. What a gift for the generation of your children or grandchildren!
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