Description: Tree with short, stout trunk, widespreading branches and broad, rounded, open crown. Old trees frequently pollards with boles 2-3m long, these live longer (typically up to 800 years).

Height: 20-25m when open grown, up to 35m when close together

Diameter: 1-2.5m, pollards up to 4.5m

Leaves: 5-13cm long, 3-6cm wide. Oblong, with 6-14 shallow rounded lobes, including two small, ear-shaped lobes at very short-stalked base. Dark green above, pale blue-green beneath. Underside by authumn often covered in small discs of spangle-gall. Varying shades of yellow and coppery brown during fisrt growth from May, then red young leaves during second growth in July.

Bark: Pale grey, closely fissured into short, narrow, vertical plates.

Twigs: Shoot green-brown, slightly bloomed blue-grey, pale buff lenticels. Bud ovoid-conic, pointed, light brown.

Flowers: Male flowers in very slender catkins in thin bunches 2-4cm long, brownish yellow until shedding invisible pollen in early may, when yellow-green. Female flowers terminal on new shoot, 1-2 peduncles 2-5cm long, bearing globular pale brown flowers, 2mm with dark red stigmas.

Acorns: 1.5-2.5cm long; egg-shaped, about one third enclosed by half-round cup, whitish-green, becoming brown, often wrinkled; 1-5 on long (4-8cm), slender stalk; maturing first year.

Habitat: Lowlands throughout and dominant on basic loams and clays. Abundant in parks, deer-parks, gardens and woods.

Range: Throughout British Isles to 450m, and Europe to 1000m, from southern Scandinavia east to the Caucasus and south reaching the Mediterranean in Italy and the Adriatic coast. West to the Pyrenees and on north and west coast of Spain.

Very long-lived, maidens to 400 years and pollards perhaps to twice that. Popularly supposed to be slow growing, really quite fast, up to 60cm in a year for a few years. Shoot expanded rapidly in a few weeks from late May. In good soil to 20 x 2m by 50 years. Girth increase slowing from 4cm to 2.5cm annually by 250 years, then decreasing. Leaves unfold April to May with great variation in any population (some as early as March). Autumn colours equally variable, October-November, though some trees green to December. Much more prone to gall-infestation than Sessile Oak.

Information: Audubon (1980), Mitchell (1978), Macdonald (1984)

Source: Weasdale Nurseries, Newbiggin-on-Lune, Cumbria.

Purchased: 1993.03.22, by us, one specimen at 4-5 feet.

Planted: 1993.04.03 European Strip, south end, E56E.

Progress: This tree is living up to its billing as quite a fast grower (though hardly competing with the nearby Alder) and is up to 3.6m at 1998.10.07. It is also infested by more varieties of gall at a higher density, none of which seem to be doing it any harm.

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