![]() The crown of the oak fills a gap between the yellow poplar and black cherry trees that are quite abundant on the upper section of the slope and the American beech and red maple that grow on the bottom of the hill.Īround the base of the red oak is a dense thicket of raspberry and spice bush. Just off of the upper section of the Ravine Trail on the Penn State New Kensington Nature Trail is a large (50 foot tall, 18 inch diameter) northern red oak five yards down the hillside, growing at a fifteen degree angle up into an open section of the canopy. Its wide range of site tolerances and its tenacious survival in forests undergoing stress make it an increasingly common component of our eastern forests. It is also associated with species like white ash, green ash, big-toothed aspen, American elm, slippery elm, the hickories, scarlet oak, and more (Braun 1950, Eyre 1980). Northern red oaks can be found occasionally in pure stands but most frequently they grow in mixed forests often with white pine, red maple, and white and black oaks. It grows best, though, in moist soils with deep “A” (upper, organic-rich) soil horizons, and on lower, concave slopes with either northerly or easterly exposures (Sander 1990). It has a very broad geographic range over the eastern half of the United States that stretches north into southern Canada and into Nova Scotia (it is the most northerly distributed oak) and south to just above the Gulf coast (Little 1979). It grows on a great variety of soils and is found in almost any topographic orientation (Sander 1990). The northern red oak is the embodiment of a generalist. Almost all of these starting forests, though, after they were cut, ended up with increasing percentages of northern red oaks in their developing forest ecosystems. Some were dominated by white oak, American chestnut, and yellow poplar, others by white pine, and even others by eastern hemlock and American beech. The pre-settlement, primary structures of these forests were quite varied. ![]() Many of the forests in which these red oaks are found are secondary or even tertiary growth forests. The picture to the left shows a large northern red oak along the Baker Trail just west of Cochran’s Mills. Their very distinctive, vertically striped bark helps to them to stand out even in dense mixed growths with many other tree species. I have seen many northern red oaks ( Quercus rubra) along the hiking trails of Western Pennsylvania. ( Click here to listen to an audio version of this blog!)
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