Neighborhood Plants: Live Oak

Neighborhood Plants brings the rangelands to our neighbors. Explore the diversity of TX plants from your own 'backyard'. In this episode, you'll learn how to identify Live Oak, a native tree that provides excellent shade across neighborhoods and rangelands. Live oak trees have a massive trunk that supports a large canopy of branches and leaves. It’s almost an evergreen tree, but not quite. Live oaks trees do not lose their leaves in the fall. Rather, the leaves remain on the tree through the winter and drop off the tree during the spring right before the new leaves emerge. Some individual live oak trees can grow massive amounts of suckers from the roots. Sometimes it is so thick that the root suckers look like a groundcover. These root suckers are attached to the roots of the main tree, so careful maintenance is required. Here’s a couple of links to articles to learn more about live oak and some maintenance tips if the live oak tree in your yard puts up a lot of root suckers: