Gray oak

[Dwight]

Anyone ever work with these. They are and evergreen oak , small leaves and are native to west Texas and southern New Mexico. They are locally common in the Organ mountains of NM.

Dwight

 

[jkd2572]

Do you have any pics?

 

[jk_lewis]

I've never seen this one, Quercus grisea, except in pictuers. Oaks tend to be very slow growers, and desert oaks are the slowest of them. I'd suspect that they would have a very larger -- and non-fibrous -- root system because they'll need to go such distanaces to find moisture, so would b tough to dig.

Leaves, while small, aren't particularly attractive.

 

[art-rodriguez]

hey Dwight
i remember seeing a stunted oak tree over in Aguirre Springs on a quick picnic there once.
looked really nice and i instantly thought "what a perfect size bonsai"
did your bonsai survive that cold air blast recently ?
i read in elpasotimes.com that a lot of palm trees and other landscaping plants were affected by it.
take care.
art rodriguez
(former el pasoan)

 

[Dwight]

Art , thats the tree. I havn't found any small ones yet but I look every time I go up there. I went up today and the oaks looked like crap. These things are supposed to be evergreen but they looked dead to me. Hope it's temporary. The frost ( it got down to -5 at the ranch and 1 above here ) did a bunch of damage. European olives and palms are real popular here. Most of them are dead. I lost a Yupon holly and some of my junies look kinda unhappy. I also have a small pinon pine that looks awful. Funny thing was this happened so fast ( it was 60 the day before ) and only lasted two nights , noone was ready and we didn't have time to do much anyway.

jkl , yep the leaves are small and not particularly pretty but the trees are georgeous when grown. Sounds pretty iffy for someone with no oak experience and almost no collecting experience.