The valley oak is the monarch of all western oaks, and perhaps of all the oaks of North America. Even in their grandest individuals, few other species attain the vast, sweeping spread that Quercus lobata regularly achieves. In part, this is due to the niche they occupy compared to other oaks. Unlike coast live or black oak, their most characteristic community is not one of dense, mixed species woodland, but rather a more open savanna where each individual can spread itself horizontally without competition for sunlight from other trees. And compared to blue oaks, valleys generally favor richer and relatively wetter areas, such as valley bottoms or wide plains, while blue oaks in their classic setting eke out a more frugal life on the drier hilltops. Here in Novato, we are fortunate to have some class A, first-rate, top-shelf valley oak habitat. While more coastal, cooler, foggier and moister parts of the county do excel us in conifer forests, our relatively drier inland climate offers the ample consolation of the noble valley oak savanna.
Archetypal Oak Trait #1: Monumental Spreading Strength
Valley oaks’ monumentality and dignified agoraphobia lend themselves to discussion of two of the key traits of oaks, applicable in some degree to many species, but perhaps particularly apropos for this tree. First: their wide spread of massive, mighty limbs. Oaks are in many cultures nearly synonymous with steadfastness and unbending dependability. These are ancient, probably prehistoric ideas – should you ever fear that your admiration of oaks has descended into mere shallow anthropomorphic animism or ephemeral whimsy, pause a moment and reflect on the notion that human impressions of oaken strength have proliferated throughout the rise and fall of civilizations, with a far longer track record than many cherished modern ideas. Consider this classic example, taught to countless little French kids and drawn from an old Aesopian precursor:
Le Chêne un jour dit au Roseau . . .
Le moindre vent qui d’aventure
Fait rider la face de l’eau
Vous oblige à baisser la tête:
Cependant que mon front au Caucase pareil,
Non content d’arrêter les rayons du Soleil,
Brave l’effort de la tempête.
Tout vous est Aquilon; tout me semble Zéphyr.
Encor si vous naissiez à l’abri du feuillage
Dont je couvre le voisinage;
Vous n’auriez pas tant à souffrir;
Je vous défendrais de l’orage.
The oak one day said to the reed . . .
The slightest breeze that chances
To ripple the water’s surface
Obliges you to bow your head;
While my brow, face to the east,
Not merely content to stop the sun’s rays,
Braves the blast of the storm.
Every breeze is Aquilon to you; gentle Zephyr to me.
If you lived under the shelter of foliage
That I extend over my surroundings,
You would not have to suffer so much;
I would defend you from the storm.
– Jean de La Fontaine
“The Oak and the Reed”
Of course the oak falls and the moral of the story is that sometimes adaptability is a better option than proud inflexibility. Still! The postulated starting point is that oaks look really strong. And they do in truth live for hundreds of years, which is really a quite venerable figure on human timescales, as long as we don’t go comparing them to redwoods and other Californian immortals. Do big, grand valley oaks sometimes shatter or topple? Sure. But these mightiest of oaks fall less often than the brittle blue oaks and the moister-dwelling live oaks, vulnerable to Sudden Oak Death and internal rot. For a valley oak, such a colossal fabled fall is a notable event coming after the passage of centuries, during which many generations of reeds and grasses came and went, and many breezes both gentle and tempestuous rustled the oak’s ever renewed leaves.
Most importantly, you should consider these claims of strength not primarily by reflection in literary history or academic debate, but by your actual first-hand experience. And there is no better way to appreciate the fundamental roots of this impression of stability amid tumult than to sit under a big valley oak on a windy day. I did so while drafting this, with the oak rising out of the churning sea of dried rattlesnake grass and coyote bush, its own leaves flapping in the wind like so many loose sails in need of trimming. When a big gust came, the outer branches would sway. But amid all this frothing greenery, the trunk and main limbs remained steady and unmoving. This windswept serenity reminds me of one of my favorite figures at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, a statue of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion in Chinese Buddhism.
A strong wind sweeps over her robes, but she stands her ground in effortless symmetry, her face retaining the same tranquil peace as ever. When the savanna floor is converted into a surging sea of grasses, when the broader world is whipped up in chaos and uncertainty, a valley oak likewise stands like an impregnable citadel and rock in the storm.
And yet…this is not the sum of the valley oak’s physical character. After all, if all I saw in them was adamantine solidity, I might as well contemplate a big rock. No, if I look closely at a valley oak and its structure, they seem to excel other trees in other respects as well:
Exposure of limbs: Compared to nearby bays and buckeyes, the leaves seem to be more on top, or at least more widely spread by the sheer extent the tree, resulting in easy visibility of the massive limbs. And it wasn’t linguistically inevitable that we use the same word for the limbs of people and trees; here you can see why we do so. I think we humans may well have always thought of trees more animistically than little shrubs because their greater verticality makes them more like upright people; having exposed, reaching limbs heightens this humanoid resemblance.
Broadness of limbs: They look mighty, like a heroic Polykleitan statue. Not spindly and weak, not lissom and graceful: the valley oak character is one of strength. Or if you think classical sculpture is a irrelevant relic of the past, like the modern superheroes that copy the ancient proportions.
Balance, though not necessarily symmetry: Sculpture and architecture are constantly striving after stable forms that achieve an organic-feeling accord with gravity rather than a sense of artificial support preventing collapse. With an oak, even one that is shaped by landscape, winds, or competition into a shape that is far from symmetrical, such a balance is inevitably present. Look at that classical statue again: it is balanced, but not symmetrical. It suggests contained elastic energy, not the mere inertness of symmetrical repose. Such is the impact of oaks as well. As Kenneth Clarke said of the Polykleitan achievement:
His first problem was to find some means by which the figure should combine repose with the suggestion of potential movement. To stand firmly is inert; to record a given point in a violent movement is, as we shall see in a later chapter, limiting and finite. Polykleitos invented a pose in which the figure is neither walking nor standing, but simply establishing a point of balance… This perfection of symmetry by balance and compensation is the essence of classical art. A figure may have within itself the rhythms of movement, but yet always comes to rest at its true center. It is complete and self-sufficient.
Spread of limbs: Wide and overarching, offering shelter, containment, and security, the canopy of a valley oak offers something you can go under and into. They feel inherently inviting to protective cover, like a house or temple, but one that is green and full of life. By uniting these evocations of a heroic human form and a protective shelter in one physical being, it is not surprising that we respond to the form of these trees in a deep, instinctive way.
Archetypal Oak Trait #2: Acorns
The relatively wide spacing of these trees gives rise to another question central to the oak mystique: how do those chunky acorns get from this tree to that spot over there where new trees are growing? In answering this question, we might as well take a leisurely and always worthwhile opportunity to consider a few facets of acorns, the distinctive seeds of oaks.
Valley oak acorns are particularly massive, larger than those of any of our other oaks, which is excuse enough for me to place a general acorn discussion here rather than with some other species. Not that size is a primary or even meaningful indicator of quality when it comes to acorns; by all accounts, the native peoples who used acorns as a major food item rated valley oak acorns as one of the least appealing (my favorite oak, the black oak, was among the most highly regarded). But within the broader scale of plant seed, acorns are notably bulky. The extra mass provides a greater store of energy with which the next generation can launch its career, but comes at the cost of severely limiting mobility: these seeds cannot be blown on the wind or consumed and then internally transported by a variety of small birds.
While pollen from their wind-pollinated catkins can be blown for miles, once the female flowers produce their seeds, those acorns have no such flying ability like the light seeds of grasses, the winged samaras of maples, of the fluff-borne seeds of willows. Instead they need animal assistance. Squirrels, woodpeckers, and intermittent humans try their hand at this game, but the champions of acorn dispersal are California scrub-jays. Often not the most popular birds in the backyard due to their brash voices and their tendency to harass, disrupt, and occasionally eat the small songbirds that many people love, jays should be recognized for their prodigious contribution to oak gardening (see Judith Larner Lowry’s book of native plant gardening essays entitled The Landscaping Ideas of Jays). They can gather and cache thousands of acorns in a season, and while their memory and cognitive skills are significantly above the avian baseline, they only remember and recover a portion of these, leaving hundreds of acorns well-planted beneath the surface where they are more likely to avoid consumption by other creatures and survive to germination.
Unfortunately, a variety of factors seem to be limiting both the sprouting of seedling valley oaks and the recruitment of seedlings into older saplings that survive the initial years. Before the rise of Sudden Oak Death, the low reproduction of valley oaks was the main topic of concern among California oak ecologists, with partial guilt assigned to changing grassland composition (more competitive introduced grasses) and cattle grazing, though there is also a possibility that valley oaks, which can live for hundreds of years, operate on longer term reproductive cycles than we are aware of and we just happen to be in a lower-reproductive period. And the good news is that we can deal with this situation bit by bit: if we plant acorns or seedlings, weed around them to avoid competition, give them a little supplemental water in their early life, and protect them with fencing from deer and cattle, they will survive and grow.
Back to the acorns themselves. I have always loved them, and I suspect some other people feel the same way, if you stop to think about them (to “stop and think” is really I think the main prerequisite for an affectionate view of natural history). There may be some subconscious anthropomorphic affinity here, the way I suspected there was between the humanizing upright structure and visible limbs of valley oaks as a whole, or between our human hands and the five-fingered leaves of buckeyes. Acorns are large and visible, pleasantly hefty and rounded, but their most distinctive feature is the cap, a word which obviously traces its sense and etymological origin to the human head (caput in Latin). Put an acorn in anyone’s hand and they will almost certainly turn it cap-upright to look at it, with the pointy “chin” at bottom, such that one could almost picture a little face upon the intervening smooth surface, making a little secret talisman of this nut.
But it is likely the combination of the various features that have been touched on here – potential for anthropomorphic visualization, a size and heft of more meaningful gravity than that of small seeds, their historical use as a major food source around the world, and their living association with the trees themselves (how many other non-commercially eaten seeds can the general public recognize by name?) – that produces their overall resonance with people. I remember clearly several scenes in one of the key movies of my childhood, Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, created by a culture a world away, yet universal in this as in so much else. Lustrous copper acorns mysteriously fall from the dark attic of an old house, a trail that leads the young heroines to sightings of the little Totoros bearing sacks of the gleaming seeds, and eventually to the big Totoro himself, the benevolent, round, and fluffy spirit of the forest. When one girl performs an act of kindness, Totoro gives her a gift. And what gift could be more appropriate to a magical forest spirit than a bag of acorns, the greatest jewels in all the kingdoms of seeds?
Identification: You can recognize valley oaks by their deciduous leaves with deep, rounded lobes (blue oak leaves are shallowly lobed to merely wavy-margined; black oak lobes terminate in pointed bristles). In general, this is enough to make identification easy throughout Marin and all of our greater region to the south. They do have an additional close relative, the Oregon white oak, which is scarce in Marin, but which becomes a regular woodland tree from Sonoma northward. Both valley and Oregon white oaks have rounded lobes, but valley oaks tend to have more (6-10) lobes, deeper and very lobata compared to Oregons’ fewer (5-7), blockier lobes. In summer and fall, look for acorns too: valley oaks have distinctively long and pointy acorns, while those of Oregon oaks are fairly typical, somewhat squat specimens. Other things you can notice about valley oaks include the deeply furrowed bark of mature trees, their preference for relatively open woodland or very open savanna, and the unmatched horizontal spread of old individuals.
Where: Valley oak is the characteristic tree of open, widely spaced oak savanna, a plant community that is most publicly accessible here in its full glory on Mount Burdell. It also grades into a somewhat denser oak woodland, gradually mixing in with black oaks, madrones, buckeyes, bays, or coast live oaks, but always avoiding the densest, darkest, and moistest woods dominated by live oaks and bays. You can also find valley oaks at Olompali, Indian Valley, Rush Creek and other woodland preserves, although most of the trees in these locations are moderate-sized specimens in mixed woodland communities.
Name: Valley oak, Quercus lobata
“Valley” refers to these trees preferred location of relatively lower lying land, with richer soil and more water compared to thinner, drier highlands. Quercus is a solid ancient Roman name for oaks (the same genus is in both America and the old world); lobata plainly refers to the deeply lobed leaves of this tree.
A remarkable essay; in a “word”: WOW – thank you, Jack!
Just came across this. I had googled “valley oak appreciation” and google did a wonderful job of leading me to you. Terrific work, Jack. The highlight was comparing a swaying oak to Guanyin, a Buddhist deity with whom I’m quite familiar (via my Chinese spouse).
I have a favorite valley oak tree at a secret location near Mt. Hamilton. It overlooks a beautiful, sometimes fog-filled, valley. I have shown that tree to my kids and suggested to them, gently, that if they ever wanted to do something to remember me by, they might want to consider simply visiting this majestic, beautiful valley oak. That’s perhaps why the Guanyin reference struck me: their mom worships Guanyin and their dad worships a Valley Oak! Perfect!
Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed the obscure comparisons; I feel validated. Now I’m just waiting for the Polykleitos fans to come out of the woodwork!