Scrub Oak Musings
Photography: Don Weller
Light from the window shines through a single scrub oak leaf I have wedged in the corner of a frame that holds a photo of my wife, Dana. The leaf is unassuming, unimpressive, like the tree it came from. Maybe four inches long with seven short rounded lobes. Its outline looks like a cookie cutter shaped to portray a whimsical snow-laden Christmas tree. I marvel at the delicate veins that grow thicker with each confluence flowing back to a single strand that runs like a tiny river down the center.
I imagine the system that supported this leaf. Its primary vein conjoins through a stem to a small twig still soft and waxy with new growth, courses back through ever-larger branches to the heartwood of the trunk, then down through a central root. A division of paths, each stretching deeper and broader into hard land, anchor the tree, connecting it to its place and to others of its kind.
The leaf and the tree it came from, for me, signify all that I love about the landscape of the Wasatch Mountains. The proper name for this plant is Gambel oak, named after the 19th century naturalist who first identified it — Dr. William Gambel. If truth be told, I imagine young Dr. Gambel would have preferred a towering spruce or fir as a namesake tree, but all of those were already named by the time he came along. Nevertheless, the common name, scrub oak, seems a better fit.
Scrub oak grows in cloned colonies. Multiple trees, often an entire stand, belong to a single living organism interconnected through a common root system. Though individual trees rarely live more than 90 years, their root systems can be thousands of years old. Scrub oak belts the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains in a nearly continuous strand. As the name implies, the squat, bushy trees are much maligned. Visitors from places whose mighty oak trees tower 100 feet tall seem embarrassed that these stunted, slow-growing relatives, rarely reaching a height of more than 20 feet, would tarnish the Oak family name. In autumn, when the leaves of neighboring bigtooth maples turn bright red, and the aspen on the higher slopes turn brilliant yellow, scrub oak leaves fade from dusty green to dull rust.
Still, lean against one of these lowly trees and run your hands along its rough bark. You’ll feel the solid tensile strength, a stubborn bedrock connection to a particular piece of ground. Scrub oak is nearly impossible to transplant — another admirable quality, I think — though most people would think you odd for want-ing to transplant one. Scrub oak acorns, an important food source to resident birds, squirrels and chipmunks, rarely germinate. Instead, the trees reproduce primarily by sending up new shoots from their extensive root systems. Those same deep roots make scrub oak drought tolerant and adaptive to fire — though the surface trees burn, the root system simply sends up new shoots.
Me, if I thought they’d take hold, I’d fill my pockets with scrub oak acorns and drop them along the path wherever I went. Then someday I’d follow the trees back home.
Mark Menlove muses about nature in each issue of Park City Magazine.
Your comments may be edited for brevity and foul language.