Week 37: Northern Red Oak (Susan Fenimore Cooper, George Francis Heath, James George Frazer)

Fig. 1. Piet Mondrian. Field with Oak Trees at Dusk (1907-1908). “Owned” by some rich person.

Waxing Gibbous Moon - 6 Days to Full; 2 Days to Fall Equinox

Headnote#

Welcome to the woodlands. There is, of course, more I would like to say about the late summer hærfest, but the call of the forest is irresistible, especially near the fall equinox, as the light slants through the trees and all that.

North American woodlands include more than 140 forest types, as recognized by the U.S. Forest Service. These are divided roughly between eastern and western formations, with coniferous softwood species dominating in the western portion of the continent and deciduous hardwood trees characterizing the eastern half. The “mighty oak,” as the English call it, is a keystone species across both of these halves and, indeed, the majority of the continent’s forests. It supports more life forms and provides more calories than most other trees: its nutritious acorns, up to 10,000 per tree in a mast year, support about 100 types of animals, and its abundant foliage sustains around 500 different types of caterpillars, which in turn are eaten by birds and small mammals. Oak forests also have played an important role in human diets from Europe to Asia, and especially as tended by indigenous Americans through burning and other practices. And they may yet play an important role in the future of food.

This is all in addition to the ink that oak galls provided for much of Euro-Mediterranean history, as I discussed in early June. And even before they facilitated Europe’s written culture, oak trees were often associated with both deities (or worshipped outright) and sacrificial killings—a fact Paul Laurence Dunbar transforms in his lynching poem, “The Haunted Oak”:

Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
     Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
     Runs a shudder over me? 

Whether scenery or sustenance, god or gallows, the oak reaches and tangles and expands, like the famous Angel Oak in South Carolina.

The northern red oak (Quercus rubra)—not to be confused with what is sometimes called the southern red oak (Quercus falcata)—is one of nearly 500 members of the Quercus genus (which includes an additional 150 to 200 natural hybrids). However, "red oaks" also correspond to a whole section of the Quercus genus, called Lobatae, which includes approximately 190 New World and high-latitude species (versus subsection Cerris, for Old World and mid-latitude species). Oaks are part of the beech family (Fagaceae), also home to beeches (obviously), chestnuts, and less common species, including chinquapins. They are trees of the northern hemisphere, originating in the Arctic (during a non-anthropogenically warm phase of the climate) and essential to the temperate landscapes and ecosystems across Asia, Europe, and North America. The northern red oak, in particular, is native to eastern North America and was called “red” by European settlers due to its fiery fall colors and pink-tinted wood—by contrast, the Ojibwe and Lenape call it wiisagi-mitigominzh and wisahkakw, respectively, due to the bitter, tannic taste of its acorns (prior to soaking or other processing). Red oaks can be distinguished by their jagged lobes and sharp, bristle tips; white oaks have rounded lobes but, perhaps surprisingly, also turn bright burgundy, orange, and other vibrant colors in the fall.

It’s still early fall here in New England; but in just a few weeks, we’ll all be seeing red.

Fig. 2. “Map 180-E. northern red oak, Quercus rubra L.” Elbert L. Little, Jr. Atlas of United States Trees, Vol. 1: Conifers and Important Hardwoods. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 1971.

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Readings#

1. But, although the forests are great and old, yet the ancient trees within their bounds must each bend individually beneath the doom of every earthly existence; they have their allotted period when the mosses of Time gather upon their branches; when, touched by decay, they break and crumble to dust. Like man, they are decked in living beauty; like man, they fall a prey to death; and while we admire their duration, so far beyond our own brief years, we also acknowledge that especial interest which can only belong to the graces of life and to the desolation of death. We raise our eyes and we see collected in one company vigorous trunks, the oak, the ash, the pine, firm in the strength of maturity; by their side stand a young group, elm, and birch, and maple, their supple branches playing in the breezes, gay and fresh as youth itself; and yonder, rising in unheeded gloom, we behold a skeleton trunk, an old spruce, every branch broken, every leaf fallen, — dull, still, sad, like the finger of Death.

   It is the peculiar nature of the forest, that life and death may ever be found within its bounds, in immediate presence of each other […]

A Lady [Susan Fenimore Cooper]. “Saturday, 28th [June]—Passed the afternoon in the woods.” Rural Hours. 1850. Third edition. New York, New York: George P. Putnam, 1851. 203-204.#

2. It is impossible to obtain exact evidence of the antiquity of the oak, or of the greatest span of its age. The inference derivable from Dryden’s poetical reference:
   
   Three centuries he grows; and three he stays,
   Supreme in state; and in three more decays,
   
   is only, of course, vague, and not founded on fact. Nevertheless, nine hundred years is by no means the limit of oak life. The ancient ‘Yule log’ was always of oak, and King Arthur’s famous ‘round table’ was made of oak wood. The famous Yardley oak, a favourite of Cowper, was believed to have been in existence at the time of William the Conqueror. Addressing it, the poet said:
   
   Oh, couldst thou speak
   As in Dodona once thy kindred trees
   Oracular, I would not curious ask
   The future best unknown; but at thy mouth
   Inquisitive, the less ambiguous past!
   By thee I might correct erroneous oft
   The clock of history; facts and events
   Timing more punctual, unrecorded facts
   Recovering, and misstated setting right.
   
   The famous Cowthorpe oak in this country, still, we believe, alive, is believed to be not far short of seventeen hundred years old! Geology tells us a good deal of the antiquity of the oak, fossil remains being abundant. An oak was discovered in Hatfield bog, Yorkshire, that, it was thought, must have lain there a thousand years at least, because some coins of the Emperor Vespasian were found in the bog close by. It must have been an enormous tree, for a portion only of the trunk found was 120 feet long; where broken off at the upper end it was 18 feet in circumference, and at the lower end 36 feet in girth, or a diameter of 12 feet from side to side!
   
   Incidentally, in proof of the prior claim of the oak for antiquity, it may be mentioned that in this country there are many more names, both of people and of places, called after that tree than after other trees: such as Aclands, Actons, Acringtons, Akenhams, Oakleys, & c.

Francis George Heath. “Oak Antiquity.” Tree Lore. London, England: Charles H. Kelly, 1912. 190-191.#

3. From an examination of the Teutonic words for "temple" Grimm has made it probable that amongst the Germans the oldest sanctuaries were natural woods. However that may be, tree-worship is well attested for all the great European families of the Aryan stock. Amongst the Celts the oak-worship of the Druids is familiar to every one, and their old word for sanctuary seems to be identical in origin and meaning with the Latin nemus, a grove or woodland glade, which still survives in the name of Nemi. Sacred groves were common among the ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct amongst their descendants at the present day. How serious that worship was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a standing tree. The culprit's navel was to be cut out and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound about its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to replace the dead bark by a living substitute taken from the culprit; it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree. At Upsala, the old religious capital of Sweden, there was a sacred grove in which every tree was regarded as divine. The heathen Slavs worshipped trees and groves. The Lithuanians were not converted to Christianity till towards the close of the fourteenth century, and amongst them at the date of their conversion the worship of trees was prominent. Some of them revered remarkable oaks and other great shady trees, from which they received oracular responses. Some maintained holy groves about their villages or houses, where even to break a twig would have been a sin. They thought that he who cut a bough in such a grove either died suddenly or was crippled in one of his limbs.

   […]

   The worship of the oak tree or of the oak god appears to have been shared by all the branches of the Aryan stock in Europe. Both Greeks and Italians associated the tree with their highest god, Zeus or Jupiter, the divinity of the sky, the rain, and the thunder. Perhaps the oldest and certainly one of the most famous sanctuaries in Greece was that of Dodona, where Zeus was revered in the oracular oak. The thunder-storms which are said to rage at Dodona more frequently than anywhere else in Europe, would render the spot a fitting home for the god whose voice was heard alike in the rustling of the oak leaves and in the crash of thunder. Perhaps the bronze gongs which kept up a humming in the wind round the sanctuary were meant to mimick the thunder that might so often be heard rolling and rumbling in the coombs of the stern and barren mountains which shut in the gloomy valley. In Boeotia, as we have seen, the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera, the oak god and the oak goddess, appears to have been celebrated with much pomp by a religious federation of states. And on Mount Lycaeus in Arcadia the character of Zeus as god both of the oak and of the rain comes out clearly in the rain charm practised by the priest of Zeus, who dipped an oak branch in a sacred spring. In his latter capacity Zeus was the god to whom the Greeks regularly prayed for rain. Nothing could be more natural; for often, though not always, he had his seat on the mountains where the clouds gather and the oaks grow.

James George Frazer. From “Tree-Worship” and “The Worship of the Oak.” The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922. 110-111, 159.#

Supplementum#

• Robin Wall Kimmerer. “The Council of Pecans.” Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

• Christina Alphonso. “Acres of Acorns.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art(November 5, 2015).

• Rob Paratley. “Economic Botany and Cultural History: Northern red oak.” University of Kentucky Urban Forest Initiative (n.d.).

• “Species Spotlight - Oaks.” National Park Service (January 15, 2025).

• Andrew L. Hipp, Paul S. Manos, and Jeannine Cavender-Bares. “How Oak Trees Evolved to Rule the Forests of the Northern Hemisphere.”

• Joe Lamp’l. “Our Most Essential Trees: The Nature of Oaks, with Doug Tallamy.” Joe Gardener (April 29, 2021).

Fig. 3. “Red Oak and The Pigeon of Passage.” Mark Catesby. The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, Vol. 1. London, England: n.p., 1729-1732. 22.

Fig. 4. “Red Oak. Quercus rubra.” From François André Michaux. The North American sylva, or A description of the forest trees of the United States, Canada and Nova Scotia. Paris, Franc: 1819.

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✦ From the Earthly Book of Hours ✦#

• After some planning and reflection, I’ve begun to work on an expanded version of The Earthly Book of Hours! It will incorporate (1) these Lectio Terra posts as a species-based medium for exploring the seasons, and (2) a layer of weather-based filters for influencing the presentation of images and readings.

• Of course, I should probably finish the first, hour-based version of the site fully (or attempt the planned print edition) before beginning a second version—but what’s the fun in patience?