Autumn colors of some native trees

Leaf colors in autumn

Green Ash	yellow
WhiteAsh	reddish-purple
River Birch	yellow
Blackgum	scarlet
Cottonwood	yellow
Flowering Dogwood	scarlet
American Elm	yellow
Hackberry	yellow
Hawthorn	scarlet
Hickory	yellow
Red Maple	red to yellow
Silver Maple	yellow
Sugar Maple	yellow, orange, red
Northern red Oak	russet to red
Scarlet Oak	russet to red
White Oak	reddish-purple
Pin Oak	bronze or red
Osage-orange	yellow
Redbud	yellow
Sassafras	orange to scarlet
Serviceberry	red-orange
Sumac	red
Sweetgum	yellow to red
Tuliptree	yellow
Black Walnut	yellow

How to identify common tree leaves

Leaf shapes and characteristics of five common types of trees

In human families, the members often resemble each other. Trees are much the same. When you learn the general appearance of one tree's leaf, you can often recognize its relatives.  You can say, "That leaf looks like a willow," just as you might say, "That boy looks like a Johnson."

And keep in mind that there are always exceptions -- some leaves don't look exactly like their relatives in every detail.

Here are some generalizations that will help you recognize five common tree families:

Maples

Long-stalked, toothed, broad leaves, shaped somewhat like a hand with the fingers spread ("palmate lobes").

Left: Sugar maple
Right: Red maple

Willows

Long, slender leaves, arranged alternately on long thin branches. The trees are usually found in wet areas.

Left:  Black willow

Right: Pussy willow

Poplars

Broad, shiny leaves with a heart shape, toothed edge, and bright green color. Long slender stems allow the leaves to dance in a breeze.

Left: (Bigtooth aspen)

Right: (Plains cottonwood)

Image credit for Plains cottonwood: USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Britton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illustrated flora of the northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. Vol. 1: 591.

Oaks

Oak leaves vary greatly in shape from one species to the next. Even a single oak tree may show a lot of variation in leaf shape! Some species of oaks have bristles at the ends of the leaf lobes; some do not. However, one thing that can be said about most oak leaves is that they are leathery in texture. Also, many of them are a little lighter and duller in color on the underside. Look on the ground under the tree for evidence of acorns.

Left: Pin oak

Right: Bur oak

Elms

Elms usually have oval leaves up to 3 inches in length, pointed on one end, with a sawtooth edge and a short stem. The veins are V-shaped and regularly spaced, almost like a feather, and the leaves are rough on the underside. The bottom of the leaf is usually uneven or unequal where it joins the stem.

Left: American elm

Right: Winged elm

Nine native trees that hold leaves in winter

Native broadleaf trees with persistent foliage

Have you noticed that a few broadleaf trees change color in fall, but don't drop their leaves? Many of their brown leaves cling to the tree throughout winter and early spring until new leaf growth begins. This characteristic is called marescence.

Here are nine native trees that behave in this fashion.

• American beech (Fagus grandifolia)
• American hophornbean (Ostrya virginiana) also called ironwood
• Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) also called American planetree or buttonwood
• Black oak (Quercus velutina)
• Blackjack oak (Quercus marilandica)
• Northern pin oak (Quercus ellipsoidalis)
• Pin oak (Quercus palustris)
• Shingle oak (Quercus imbricaria)
• White oak (Quercus alba)

Perhaps it's no surprise to you that the majority are oaks. Owners of these oak trees often complain that they shed leaves all winter long. I know an elderly lady who is very opposed to oaks as the national tree. She has lived her entire adult life under big white oaks, and she hates the way they drop their leaves a little at a time, all winter. "Just not tidy trees," she told me.

Trees with some winter foliage will perform better as a windbreak, screen, or sound barrier than trees that have dropped all their leaves.

They will also cast more shade in the winter than trees that have dropped their leaves. Sunshine on the house in winter is generally a good thing, so consider that when choosing a planting site for a tree that keeps winter leaves.

Our pin oak on the evening of February 21.

Look at all those leaves!

Image credit: Pin oak leaf drawing by J. R. Stacy of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Trees with fine foliage

Trees with small leaves or leaflets

Why choose a tree with fine foliage rather than coarse foliage? One reason is to create an optical illusion. You can make a small yard appear longer by using plants and shrubs with large leaves in the foreground and trees with small leaves in the background.

Trees with fine foliage don't make as much of a mess when the leaves drop in autumn. The leaves break down faster and blow away easier. Thus, less raking is required. A few passes with the lawn mower may eliminate the need to rake at all.

Most trees with finer foliage don't create dense shade. Grass and many plants, flowers, and shrubs do better in dappled shade than in dense shade.

I've listed a few native trees below that have small or fine foliage. There are others, but I've limited the list to some that come through most ice/wind events without severe damage.

Of course, there are other factors to consider as well, such as the type of soil and the amount of moisture that will be available to the tree. Links will open an information page about the species at the USDA Plants database.

Amelanchier canadensis -- Canadian serviceberry
Carpinus caroliniana -- American hornbeam
Crataegus -- Hawthorn species
Gymnocladus dioicus -- Kentucky coffeetree
Malus ioensis -- Prairie crabapple
Ptelea trifoliata -- Common hoptree
Quercus palustris -- Pin oak
Viburnum prunifolium -- Blackhaw viburnum
Viburnum rufidulum -- Rusty blackhaw viburnum

Technorati tags: fine foliage, small leaves

Some native "weeping" trees

Trees with naturally drooping leaves

Bald cypress branches with fruit. Image by Tatiana Gerus.

A tree is said to have "weeping" branches or foliage when the leaves hang down from their stems and branches. One Merriam Webster definition for weeping is "having slender pendent branches."

Without question, the weeping willow is the best-known and most exaggerated of all trees with this form, but it's certainly not the only one. Here are some other native American trees with pendulous branches.

Don't expect them to look like weeping willows. They look like their own unique selves.

Betula alleghaniensis -- Yellow birch
Betula lenta -- Sweet birch
Betula nigra -- River birch
Betula papyrifera -- Paper birch
Betula populifolia -- Gray birch
Oxydendrum arboreum -- Sourwood
Prunus serotina -- Black cherry
Taxodium distichum -- Common baldcypress (Bald cypress)
Tsuga canadensis -- Canada hemlock

Sourwood leaves and flowers
Image by Jim Conrad, www.backyardnature.net

Black cherry leaves and fruit
Image by Wikimedia contributor Pleple2000

Sycamore leaves in autumn

Platanus occidentalis, American planetree

I like sycamore trees in the fall when their leaves begin to change color. They look like someone has tied colored handkerchiefs to all the branches -- or so it seems to me. Each leaf is so large that it makes its own splash of color.

I found this sycamore growing in my garden one wet spring about a dozen years ago. It was just a seedling. Sycamore seeds like to fall onto mud flats and take root, and "mud flat" describes my garden that spring. We dug the little tree up and planted it on the far end of our little acreage.

(The rainy season that year was interesting. A killdeer made its nest in my muddy washed-out garden, and she had a hissy-fit every time I came anywhere near it. I felt bad about making her fake a broken wing all the time so I just let her have that end of the garden for a while. But now, back to the sycamore tree...)

I estimate the current height of the sycamore tree at 35-40 feet. I'm not real good at estimating height, but it's a good 15-20 feet above the power lines.

Ah, yes, the power lines. They are going to be a problem. We underestimated the spread that the tree would develop and the power company will want to trim back its branches on that side. We'll have to let them do it. One good thing about it -- sycamores aren't a densely branched tree.

Sycamores may grow up to 70 feet in 20 years. They are long-lived trees, often living over 300 years. They often reach 100 feet in height and they may be even wider than they are tall!

November Night

Listen...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

Poem by Adelaide Crapsey. Rrom The New Poetry: An Anthology,
edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson.
Published in New York by The Macmillan Company in 1917.
morgueFile photo by S. Whitmore

White oak bark and leaves

Quercus alba, foliage and trunk

One of the most helpful tree-identification things I've learned lately is that the sinuses of oak leaves at the top of the tree will be more deeply cut than those at the bottom of the tree. (Sinuses are the indentations between the lobes.) Apparently, a leaf that is getting plenty of sunshine doesn't need as much surface area as a leaf that is growing in the shade.

The white oak leaves in the image above are a good example. The leaves at the top of the tree (in the background at the top of the photo) have much deeper sinuses than those at the bottom of the tree (foreground.)

White oak bark is quite distinctive in color. It's actually a light gray, not white, but it's lighter in color than many tree barks. It's often a bit scaly. You can see some scales on the trunk in the above photo at upper left.

Recently, I happened to find a great image of white oak leaves and acorns from the early 1900s in the Kentucky Virtual Library. Its caption mentions that they came from "a monster white oak near Persimmon." Persimmon is a small settlement in Monroe County, Kentucky (north of Tompkinsville, in south central Kentucky.)

Autumn glory of an old sugar maple

Acer saccharum, with yellow fall color

The old sugar maple tree in front of the kitchen door is in glorious fall color right now.

Sugar maples have some of the most brilliant autumn colors of all trees. They can be yellow, orange, or red.

The rest of our old sugar maples grow in a row in front of the site of the old log house. They all turn orange. This one grows in a different area of the yard, near the old garden site, and it's the only one that turns yellow.

Standing beneath this tree and appreciating its rich, beautiful color for a few minutes will make any autumn day better.

Ten native trees with yellow autumn leaves

The foliage of these trees is golden in the fall.

1. American beech — Fagus grandifolia

2. Silver maple - Acer saccharinum

3. Tuliptree (tulip poplar) — Liriodendron tulipifera

4. Eastern larch — Larix laricina

5. Shagbark hickory - Carya ovata

6. Black Walnut - Juglans nigra

7. Honeylocust - Gleditsia triacanthos

8. Eastern poplar - Populus deltoides

9. Bur oak - Quercus macrocarpa

10. White ash — Fraxinus americana L.

Related post: Ten native trees with red autumn leaves

Ten native trees with red autumn leaves

Trees that have red foliage in the fall

1. Sumacs—Rhus spp.
2. Red maple—Acer rubrum
3. Tupelo—Nyssa sylvatica
4. Sweet gum—Liquidambar styraciflua
5. Dogwood—Cornus florida
6. Serviceberry—Amalanchier canadensis
7. Hawthorn—Crataegus crus-galli L.
8. Scarlet oak—Quercus coccinea
9. Red oak—Quercus rubra
10. Sorrel tree—Oxydendrum arboreum