By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on December 24, 2003
The Plant of the Month to begin our 2004 Operation NICE! (Natives Instead of the Common Exotics!) is Chinquapin oak (Quercus muhlenbergii).
We are spotlighting this native oak because it is an attractive landscape tree, is not susceptible to oak wilt, and is commonly available at local nurseries.
In some ways our choice of a deciduous oak is unfair to the nurseries who participate in Operation NICE!, because the leafless trees in midwinter are not in their most appealing state.
Fully leafed plants, of course, are much more likely to catch the eye of a nursery customer.
However, the chief aim of Operation NICE! is to introduce home gardeners to native plants that can be used in landscaping. The best time to plant these natives commonly does not coincide with the time the plants are at their most commercially appealing.
Perhaps we can encourage home landscapers to look ahead. Getting those ugly-duckling saplings into the ground at the right time will bring a transformation to swan trees later in the year.
Late fall and early winter are good times to plant trees in the Boerne area.
Chinquapin oak is a narrow, round-topped tree, usually growing no taller than about 50 feet high in Texas.
For me, the most attractive thing about this oak is the distinctive foliage.
Shiny, saw-toothed-edged leaves are 4-6 inches long and 1-4 inches wide. Acorns are one-half to one-and-a-quarter inches long. In my youth when I frequently visited the Hill Country, I never heard anyone mention chinquapin oak. I thought it was an East Texas tree.
Therefore, it was a pleasant surprise to realize recently that this oak is a native of the Edwards Plateau, north Central Texas, and even Trans-Pecos Texas (besides the eastern US, Ontario, and northeastern Mexico).
The new “Atlas of Vascular Plants of Texas” does not show this oak occurs in East Texas. Now I realize that I thought chinquapin oak is an East Texas native because I confused it with the Allegheny chinquapin (Castanea pumila), a member of the beech family common in the Piney Woods.
In fact, the chinquapin oak gets its common name from the similarity of its leaves with those of the Allegheny chinquapin.
Perhaps the other common name “chinkapin” helps distinguish our oak from the true chinquapin.
The Boerne Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas provides free care instructions for chinquapin (chinkapin) oak at the nurseries participating in Operation NICE!: Barkley’s Nursery Center, Boerne in Bloom Garden Center, Fair Oaks Nursery, Hill Country African Violets and Nursery, Maldonado Landscape and Nursery, and Where Wild Things Grow Native-Plant Nursery.
The species name for Quercus muhlenbergii is in honor of Gotthilf Hunrich Ernst Muhlenberg, a self-taught botanist who lived from 1753 to 1815. Muhlenberg was born in Pennsylvania, where his father had immigrated to America at the beckoning of the Lutheran Church of Pennsylvanian. G.H.E. Muhlenberg was educated in Germany and became a respected clergyman and scholar.
As the youngest son of a prominent family involved in the American Revolution, Muhlenberg had to escape from Philadelphia and lived in Lancaster County until the British withdrew.
During this temporary exile he became seriously interested in botany and began to exchange letters and specimens with famous botanists of America and Europe.
While making a survey of the plants of Lancaster County, he became interested in fungi, lichens, mosses, sedges, rushes, and grasses.
His collections and notes-were important to early 19th Century plant taxonomy. Muhlenberg is responsible for the names of nearly 150 vascular plant species, 68 of which are still considered valid.
Taxa named in honor of G.H.E. Muhlenberg include a sedge, a knotweed, a gentian, a willow, two lichens, two mosses, a fungus, a turtle, and а genus of grass (Muhlenbergia) with 72 species.
