Quercus shumardii prophouse-fall-2026 cool shade over a town

cool shade over a town square

and takes well to being limbed up into a handsome small specimen tree with smooth gray bark

Little pruning is needed beyond shaping

the needles give the whole tree a silvered

Quercus shumardii prophouse-fall-2026 cool shade over a townThere is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all