A tree up to 120° high, with a tall trunk occasionally 5° in diameter, stout wide-spreading branches forming a broad rather open head, and gray or grayish brown glabrous branchlets. Winter-buds ovoid, acute or acuminate, about ¼′ long, with closely imbricated gray glabrous or rarely pubescent scales. Bark 1′—1½′ thick, ridged, broken into small appressed plates scaly on the surface. Wood heavy, hard, close-grained, light reddish brown, often manufactured into lumber in the Mississippi valley and considered more valuable than that of the northern Red Oak.
Distribution. Borders of streams and swamps in moist rich soil; coast region of Texas eastward from the Colorado River and ranging inland up the valley of that river to Burnet County, southeastern Oklahoma, through Arkansas, southeastern Kansas and Missouri to Fayette County, Iowa, southern Illinois and Indiana, the neighborhood of Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, and southeastern Michigan (near Portage Lake, Jackson County); through the eastern Gulf States to western and central Florida and northward in the neighborhood of the coast to the valley of the Neuse River, North Carolina; Chesapeake Beach, Calvert County, Maryland (W. W. Ashe); ranging inland in the south Atlantic States to Rome, Floyd County, Georgia, Calhoun Falls, Abbeville County, and Columbia, Richland County, South Carolina, and Chapel Hill, Orange County, North Carolina. Passing into
Quercus Shumardii var. Schneckii Sarg.
Quercus texana Sarg. in part, not Buckl.
Quercus Schneckii Britt.
Differing from the type in the deep cup-shaped cup of the fruit covered with thin scales, rarely much thickened and tuberculate at base (only on river banks near Vicksburg, Warren County, Mississippi), and connected with it by forms with the cups of the fruit differing from saucer to deep cup-shaped.
Distribution. Growing with Quercus Shumardii; more common in Texas and in the Mississippi valley than the type, and ranging eastward through Louisiana and Mississippi to central and southern Alabama, central and southeastern Tennessee (neighborhood of Chattanooga), and central Kentucky; apparently not reaching the Atlantic States.
3. [Quercus texana] Buckl.
Leaves widest above the middle, broad-cuneate, concave-cuneate or nearly truncate at base, deeply or rarely only slightly divided by broad sinuses rounded in the bottom into 5 or 7 lobes, the terminal lobe 3-lobed and acute at apex, the upper lateral lobes broad and more or less divided at apex and much larger and more deeply lobed than those of the lowest pair, when they unfold densely covered with fascicled hairs and often bright red, soon glabrous, thin, dark green and lustrous above, pale and lustrous and rarely furnished below with small inconspicuous axillary tufts of pale hairs, 3′—3½′ long, 2½′—3′ wide, with a thin midrib and slender primary veins running to the points of the lobes; petioles slender, soon glabrous, ¾′—1½′ in length. Flowers: staminate in slender villose aments 3′—4′ long; calyx thin, villose on the outer surface, divided into 4 or 5 acute lobes shorter than the stamens; pistillate on short hoary tomentose peduncles, their involucral scales brown tinged with red; stigmas bright red. Fruit short-stalked, usually solitary; nut ovoid, narrowed and rounded at apex, light red-brown, often striate, ¼′—¾′ long and broad, sometimes acute, nearly 1′ in length and not more than ⅓′ in diameter; cup turbinate, covered with thin ovate acuminate slightly appressed glabrous scales, in the small fruit of trees on dry hills inclosing a third or more of the nut, in the larger fruit of trees on better soil comparatively less deep.