Range: Eastern North America.
Soil and location: It will grow in poor soils but does best where the soil is rich and well drained.
Enemies: None of importance.
Value for planting: The black oak is the poorest of the oaks for planting and is rarely offered by nurserymen.
Commercial value: The wood is heavy, hard and strong, but checks readily and is coarse grained. It is of little value except for fuel. The bark is used for tannin.
Other common names: Yellow oak.
Comparisons: The black oak might sometimes be confused with the red and scarlet oaks. The yellow, bitter inner bark will distinguish the black oak from the other two. The light-colored, smooth bark of the red oak and the dark, ridged bark of the black oak will distinguish the two, while the bark of the scarlet oak has an appearance intermediate between the two. The buds of the three species also show marked differences. The buds of the black oak are covered with hairs, those of the scarlet oak have fewer hairs and those of the red are practically free from hairs. The leaves of each of the three species are distinct and the growth habits are different.
Red Oak (Quercus rubra)
Distinguishing characters: The bark is perpendicularly fissured into long, smooth, light gray strips giving the trunk a characteristic pillar effect as in Figs. [61] and [94]. It has the straightest trunk of all the oaks. The leaves possess more lobes than the leaves of any of the other species of the black oak group, see [Fig. 62]. The acorns, the largest among the oaks, are semispherical with the cups extremely shallow. The buds are large and sharp pointed, but not as large as those of the black oak. They also have a few fine hairs on their scales, but are not nearly as downy as those of the Black oak.