By Staff
Last spring I was over at the local USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Cassopolis jawing the fat with those great folks about prairies, butterflies and such things. On my way out one of the gals said, "Hey, you want some swamp white oak to stick in at your place? We have a bunch left over from our tree sale and they're just going to get thrown out." I thought I was pretty up on our native trees but swamp white oak was a new one on me. Deducing from the name that it was a wetland dweller it peaked my interest. We've recently lost a number of ash trees from some of our wetland areas and I've been wondering what to replace them with.
She explained that while swamp white oaks are most often found in moist river bottoms they do well in the uplands, too. In fact, they were promoting them for city and yard use. I took all I figured I'd have time and ambition to plant then went to study up on my new found bounty. The gal had assured me it was native to this area (I don't plant any nonnative species in our habitat area) and she was right. It occurs in a fairly narrow band from the lower Northeastern states westward through Ohio, Indiana, southern Michigan and westward to eastern Iowa, northern Missouri and southern Minnesota.
Swamp white oak is similar to regular white oak. They can reach up to 70 feet tall with a trunk 2 to 3 feet across, though ancient specimens are known to reach up to 8 feet in diameter. Like white oak, the swamp variety lives a long time, up to 300 years or more. They're great wildlife trees. The leaves are large and fairly dense, providing good cover for squirrels and birds. The acorns are large, sweet and succulent, not bitter like red and black oak acorns. Most oak species aren't much in the way of fall colors, the leaves pretty much just turning dull brown, but not the swamp white oak. Its leaves turn showy hues of copper, red and yellow. The wood as lumber has all the prized attributes of regular white oak, meaning dense, hard and highly rot resistant.
With these credentials it was obvious I had some darned good trees but I was really floored when I found out its forgiving tolerance for growing conditions. Besides thriving in both wetlands and uplands, it will grow in any soil from clay to loam to sand. It prefers the acidic side but will put up with some alkalinity. Anywhere from full sun to moderate shade is peachy.
The real love affair culminated when I discovered first hand just how tough this tree is. I had some saplings I didn't get in at the farm. I planted some of them in the hard pan, clay soil near my house. This stuff is like pottery clay. The others sat in the back of my truck for a week or so, totally dry. This is after sitting unattended in bags at the NRCS office for weeks. Feeling sorry for them, I stuffed them in the water filled drainage ditch along my driveway for a drink, fully shaded in deep woods. There they sat forgotten for I can't remember how many weeks. Somewhere in that time the drainage ditch dried up and they were again bone dry but the tiny, green leaves proved the saplings hired on tough. Still with no time to deal with them, I marched them over to the pond and laid the root sections into the water, the tops lying up on the bank. This was like in early June. They totally slipped my mind. Yesterday I noted that the ones planted in the hard clay were putting up a good fight with the weeds. Then I remembered the ones I'd laid in the pond over three months ago. I took a peak and by golly the tops had made a sharp turn skyward and clusters of oak leaves are shading the bank. No dirt whatsoever, just water. Now that's tough. They're truly the "Little Trees That Could." Carpe diem.