At Native Forest Nursery we grow bare root seedlings and #3 container trees. Our container trees are grown in a #3 air pruned pot. This root making container eliminates nearly all potential for root wrapping. This allows for an excellent root structure and delivers an extremely healthy tree. The bare root seedlings at our nursery are grown in a sandy loam soil with high organic matter content, which provides an extremely healthy environment for our seedlings. Our bare root liners and seedlings are hand lifted, packaged, and kept in cold storage until you are ready to plant. Conservation uses for our products include reclamation, mitigation, reforestation, restoration, wildlife habitat improvement and wetland uses. Horticultural uses for our products include field liners, container liners, landscape plantings, budding stock, grafting stock and ornamental uses.
|Latin Name:||Quercus palustris|
|Fall Foliage:||Deep red|
|Bloom Time:||April to May|
|Zone:||Zone 4 to Zone 8|
|Size:||50 to 70 feet|
|Spread:||40 to 60 feet|
|Care:||Medium to wet, well drained soil|
Quercus Palustris—commonly known as the Pin Oak—is commonly used landscaping oak, and with good reason. This pioneering species has a commendable growth rate, with a mature such specimen reaching heights of 50-70 ft. with a spread of approximately 40-60 ft. This tree is prized for its aesthetically pleasing pyramidal shape, quite distinctive in its symmetry in respect to other oak varieties of the Fagaceae family. Most of these trees have a columnar trunk with a distinctive branch arrangement: the upper branches point up, the middle branches stretch out horizontally, and the lowest branches droop towards the earth. The Pin Oak has an average lifespan of 120 years, though some specimens have been recorded as being several centuries old.
With a 4-8 hardiness zone rating, the Pin Oak is primarily distributed throughout the eastern and central states, ranging from Connecticut to Georgia to Kansas, though it has also been noted to thrive in temperate regions of Canada, Australia, and Argentina. This species is often found in wetlands, primarily floodplains and riverbanks, due to its high preference for medium to wet, well-drained soils. Its deciduous canopy flourishes with access to full sunlight, colored a vibrant dark green that pairs well with its gray-brown bark. As is typical of most oak species, the Pin Oak’s flowers emerge as yellow-green catkins in April and May. Monoecious yet self-incompatible, these flowers require the presence of another oak—usually Northern Red Oak or Scarlet Oak, if not Pin Oak—to serve as a pollinator.
The tree’s foliage is thick and lustrous, offering dense shade. In the autumn, it puts on a beautiful display of deep scarlet and russet-red hues. The older the Pin Oak gets, the less tolerant it becomes of shade, and this species therefore often reigns in forests as a dominant or co-dominant tree. Because it produces an abundance of acorns, a Pin Oak will propagate and evolve more quickly than other competing species in heavy wet soils; being allelopathic, the Pin Oak also tends to crowd out other understory vegetation in the fight for survival.