Leaves Get in the Way
Mid-winter at Cleveland Botanical Garden is a time to look up. Vivid autumn is a faded photograph lost in mom’s dresser drawer, and the twinkle of the 
holidays is now an unplugged string of lights lying in the snow. The days are still weak but growing stronger, and the sky is a drama of frozen smoke and clouds like anvils and granite.
The leaves are gone and the little grove is laid bare. Our dozens of big trees, remnants of Wade Oval’s once-forest of oaks and tulips, now dare to throw their crosshatch of flying beam and lintel against the framing sky.
One tree in particular catches my attention. It is the red oak (Quercus rubra) growing in the circle of lawn near the C.K. Patrick Garden. There is no better specimen in Northeast Ohio. From a sturdy buttress of exposed roots, it bends skyward on a massive, branchless trunk. The bark is steely and segmented like armor plate. At about 45 feet above the turf, it abruptly sends out three thick limbs, and then a few feet higher, several more. They proceed to radiate upward, divide and sub-divide in patterns repeating the stronger patterns beneath them, and end in pencil-twigs and rocket-buds, 70 feet aloft; a crown that offers royalty to the surrounding grove.
Red oaks are perhaps the most common deciduous tree in our local upland woods. But familiarity does not breed contempt. Their numbers provide endless variation to the red oak theme. For instance, the bowed trunk that our sample displays is a tendency throughout the species — like a gentle conceit — that is fun to notice. Sometimes, it is rakish and exaggerated on that odd individual daring to grow out over the brink of a local ravine. Couple this trait to the elbowed, muscled, sinewy limbs, and the red oak becomes so distinctive that a spotter can identify a red oak against the far horizon.
Oaks as a group number over 700 species, and circumnavigate the North Temperate Zone. They are then split into the red and white oak tribes. Ours is in the red tribe, which means that its leaves have pointed, minutely-bristled lobes instead of rounded lobes; and that its acorns take two growing seasons to mature on the branch instead of just one.
Red oak acorns look like velvety “heads” sporting jaunty berets. They fall to the ground in October, immediately germinate and issue carmine-red tap roots, pause for the winter, then resume business next spring. This was a good year for acorns (every several is a cyclical “mast” year), and it was like walking on garden marbles for awhile there. But today, most of ours are reduced to husks heaped at the base of the trunk, complements of hungry fox squirrels.
Please don’t surrender these days to the television. Look up through our Garden and witness the beauty and strength of the red oak revealed, as it stands against Cleveland’s dramatic winter sky. Too soon it will be April, and so many leaves attendant.
Posted Mark Bir
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