PAINTING: FREDERIC EDWIN/FLORENCE GRISWOLD MUSEUM COIN PHOTO: US MINT
The Charter Oak (seen here in an 1846 painting by Frederic Edwin) was so important to Connecticut’s history that almost 150 years after it fell down, it was put on the state’s quarters.
About the Oak Tree
nuts were eaten as a staple, much like cornmeal. In the spring, the Native Americans watched the oak trees and used their leaves as a guide for planting corn. They knew that when the oaks’ new leaves were the size of a mouse’s ear, it was safe to put the seeds into the ground.
Early settlers also knew the locations of forest oaks by heart. Areas around oak trees were always excel- lent hunting sites, because turkeys, deer, and feral hogs came there to forage for acorns.
The oak tree became politically intertwined with American history as early as 1662, when King Charles II granted the Connecticut Colony a charter allowing a high degree of self- government. But when King James II succeeded him a few years later, he wanted control back. As legend has it, the king sent a governor-general to physically retrieve the charter, but the colonists, unwilling to allow the king
AK TREES are native to the Northern Hemisphere, in both the Old World and the New World. There are more than six hundred species of oak trees and shrubs, most of them members of the genus Quercus. A number of other species, including the Japa- nese stone oak, are members of the genus Lithocarpus, and a handful of plant species in other genuses are also called oaks. Oak trees include both deciduous and evergreen spe- cies; the evergreens, known as live oaks, are not a genetically distinct subgroup: live oak species are found in all of the different subgenuses of genus Quercus.
O Oaks are distinguished by their
spirally arranged leaves and their fruit, the distinctive hard-fleshed and capped acorn. Oaks vary greatly in
Though oaks can range from less than five feet to more than a hundred feet tall, the familiar capped acorn is common to them all. PHOTO: MEDIA BAKERY
size: some, like the northern red oak, can grow to well over a hundred feet in height; others, like the California scrub oak, reach a height of less than five feet. Though oak trees can be found in both warm and cold climates, the majority of the species are found in warmer climates: of the more than three hundred species found in North America, only about sixty exist north of Mexico.
Oak wood has been put to many commercial uses. Oak timbers have been used in the past to build sailing ships for commercial and military purposes. They continue to be used in wood-frame houses, furniture, and flooring. Tannin, a chemical used in producing leather, can be obtained from the bark of several species of oak. And the bark of the cork oak, which grows mainly in Spain and Portugal, is the sole source for corkwood for uses from bottle corks to corkboards to musical instruments, where it is used to join sections of woodwind instruments, such as clarinets, together with airtight seals. —TS
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