red oak/white oak

[bruce56bb]

i just read that the easy way to identify red or white oak is to look at the leaf.
red oak=pointed leaves
white oak=rounded leaves
can anyone validate this for me?
thanks bruce

 

[Eric Johnson]

That's a pretty good general rule. White oak is also pretty easy to spot from the bark--it tends to be lighter in color and have a softer texture.

 

[martel]

this could be a really nice wiki entry- tree ID through pics of leaves, bark and splits

 

[martel]

the leaf IDing is good, but I feel like with the scrounge and winter work I am more often trying to do the harder work of IDing without leaves... trying to learn bark and grain etc. With leaves I am doing all right and lots of internet resources.

 

[daninohio]

I've been bucking a lot of wood lately and was looking today to see if I had black locust or honeylocust (it was honeylocust).

Here is a good link intended for the OH area, but useful elsewhere too, I'm sure:

http://www.oplin.org/tree/

The ones I viewed had good pictures of leaves, fruit, bark and silhouette/form.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

If it is dry, you can blow right through a piece of riven red oak. Red oak is basicly a bunch of hollow straws. It's pretty neat when you stick the other end of the stick in some water... cool bubbles. White oak has blockages that do not allow you to blow through it.

White oaks rays are also much more pronounced than those on red oak. Check out some old mission style furniture to see the rays on white oak.

Matt

 

[EatenByLimestone]

If I remember, there was something about yearly acorn production too. One has yearly acorns, the other is every other year, but I'm not sure on this one...

 

[BrotherBart]

There are several web sites that allow you to figure out tree species by using leaf characteristics. They work well - I have IDed musclewood, tupelo, aspen, and several others on the first try using them.

With regard to white oak and red oak, the easiest way to differentiate them is the leaves, as mentioned. After that, get them into nice rounds and split about 10 of the rounds. If your shirt is saturated, it's white oak, else, red.

Drop the tree. If about four seconds later the smell hits ya, it's red oak.

 

[Eric Johnson]

Smells like some old geezer has been drinking bourbon and throwing up for the past three days.