Groves of Oregon White Oak, Past and Future

This winter, probably for the first time, the Key Peninsula will see large plantings of Oregon white oak. About 500 will be planted on the Holden property near Vaughn and another 300 on the Robinson property near Key Center, as part of the DNR-funded forest improvement projects described in José Alaniz’s October article.

What is this tree, and how might it fit into our peninsula ecosystem?

There are some 500 different types of oaks in the world. While the greatest diversity is in Mexico, the United States has an impressive 90 species. They have radiated into nearly every temperate habitat, becoming a familiar neighbor and a storehouse of culture.

But not here.

Oaks achieved their diversity, in some ways, by refusing to over-specialize. They may grow slowly, but they tolerate a wide range of conditions and have cultivated a huge range of relationships with other plants, fungi, and animals. No other North American tree supports more insect life. An oak’s dense, strong, infinitely useful wood is symbolic of the vertebral structure it provides to American woodlands.

But oaks shrivel in the shade of taller trees. The only oak in western Washington is Oregon white oak, known also as Garry oak, and it’s barely here. It has the poor fortune of attempting to live in one of the great conifer forests of the world.

Its stronghold is in the open Willamette Valley of Oregon. It grows throughout the Columbia Gorge and is a common sight along the I-5 corridor north from Vancouver. Even at 70 mph, you can appreciate the twisting limbs and spreading canopies. At Joint Base Lewis-McChord, beautiful oak savannas have been maintained, and in places like Lakewood and Tumwater, oaks can still be seen in vacant lots, though bulldozers get more of them every year.

The old oak prairies south of Tacoma struck early explorers with their beauty. They were ideal deer habitat. They hosted birds, butterflies, flowers, and indigenous foods found nowhere else in what is now Washington.

Tribes maintained them with fire. Today, without fire, fast-growing firs threaten to suffocate the old oaks. The invasion of Scotch broom has not only decimated native prairie plants, it has also made the return of burns a dangerously explosive proposition.

Up here around Puget Sound, oak groves are exceedingly rare. There are a few in the Sequim rain shadow and on rocky hillsides in the San Juans. Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island was named for its pocket of oaks, and a small grove is protected on the Tahuya Peninsula. There are a few more along Hood Canal and on Harstine Island.

My current favorite grove — only a handful of trees — is on tiny McMicken Island. Stunted by saltwater, the oaks lean over the high tide line like gnarled old men.

Perhaps they are reminiscent of the oaks found in 1792 by Archibald Menzies near Port Ludlow. The surgeon-naturalist had energy only to mention them, without description — the men of the Vancouver Expedition had spent a miserably rainy night with no shelter.

“The following day continud thick rainy weather,” Menzies wrote in his journal, “so that we could not stir to any advantage.— As intervals of fair or clear weather permitted parties strolld along the Beach & met with some Oak Trees.”

Anthropologists have wondered if indigenous people might have planted these tiny, isolated groves around Puget Sound. Recent research comparing the genetics between groves suggests that even during the last ice age, there may have been northern groves near the southern lobes of the glaciers, and that oak pollen intermingles over great distances.

Ethnobotanist Erna Gunther recorded that the Cowlitz and Chehalis peoples, who lived in the heart of the oak’s Washington range, ate the acorns. They roasted them over coals or buried them in slough mud to leach their tannins. Puget Sound people, on the other hand, did not know acorns as a food. But I wonder, could the cultural knowledge of oak grove tenders have been niche enough to have been lost by the time Gunther gathered her information from tribal elders in the 1930s?

Ignoring, for a moment, the direct impact of chainsaws and bulldozers, Washington’s historical oak groves have been pushed to the brink by the erasure of tribes from the land they knew better than anyone. The absence of their care and culture has favored a proliferation of conifers and invasive brush.

All of this ratchets up the questions I have about the two clusters of Oregon white oak I am aware of on the Key Peninsula.

Magnificent oaks grace the yards of homes around the Vaughn boat launch. Just how old are they? Did the early settlers have a thing for passing around seedlings, perhaps grown from a package of acorns sent by a relative further south?

Or could the trees possibly be a historical grove that predates the settlement of Vaughn?

Then there is a seemingly natural grove on a south-facing bluff near Devil’s Head, 19 trees tangled up in poison oak, mixed into a loose, steep forest of madrona, fir, and maple. They twist at wild angles to stay in the light. The largest is 14 inches in diameter. What is their story? How did they get here?

Personally, I have propagated and planted several Oregon white oaks on my farm. At first I wondered if they belonged. I marveled at the 10-inch taproot they grew while sporting only a few puny leaves. I cursed the voles that disappeared two of them soon after planting. As I have watched and watered them, a definite vision of their dappled shade has sneaked up on me. Yet they remain tiny, and my nagging fear that they do not belong has not left.

Well, fossilized acorns have been found in 15-million-year-old chert in the Yakima Canyon, and they are a long-extinct species of white oak. Landscapes shift. Plant communities follow. The rare Oregon white oak groves of western Washington are not only inheritances of natural beauty but invitations to continue an ancient tradition of care and management.

In our rural community, on farms and homesteads and woodlots, we are all the time creating such landscapes of care. Oaks show that such things take time. They have the strength to tie us to place and to a future that should long outlast us. Joe Robinson told me, as he described the farm he envisions building, “Now I just want to live long enough to see the first acorns come.”