The black oak is the working-man's forest tree. Not particularly spectacular or elegant, often gnarled and leaning, this oak is neither graceful nor majestic, yet it is found in almost every eastern environment, from poor soil to rich, from wet forest to dry. It flowers in the spring, photosynthesizes through summer, and feeds the forest critters with its acorns in the fall. Valued in colonial times for the yellow dye that can be extracted from its inner bark, but now largely ignored by society, this tree minds it own business in the canopies of our eastern forests.
Black oak belongs to the red oak subgenus.
It has larger acorn caps than the red oak, and they usually cover approximately half of the acorn, which is usually smaller than that of the red oak. The bark of the black oak is dark gray, and fractures into a scaly pattern, unlike the smooth barks of the red and pin oaks. The leaves are sometimes hairy, and show a very high degree of variability in shape. The flowers are wind pollinated.