Identifying Oak Trees for Dummies

Oak leaf

Let's face it: there are some questions that can't be answered in a simple narrative format, such as that used by content farms like eHow.com. Unfortunately, that never stopped the voracious, cash-hungry contributors to the sites; self-described "journalists" who poured forth half-assed explanations of everything from aardvark "facts" to zymurgy "how-tos"; and in the process, often got it wrong.  Today the topic at hand is GardenGuides.com's  "How to Identify an Oak Tree by a Leaf," and eHow contributor Elizabeth Knoll (already on the Antisocial Network's short list of prize-winning eHow dumbasses) was perfectly happy to demonstrate just how poorly prepared she was to answer this question.

This is a tough question to answer in the first place because it's ambiguous: is the question "how do you differentiate among oak leaves?" or is it "how do you narrow the tree down to an oak?" Apparently, Elizabeth decided to "answer" both questions – though she didn't manage either one particularly well.

Liz starts by helping people zero in on an oak. She does so by pulling some random factoids out of a dichotomous key she found somewhere online:

"Oak trees have alternate branching. This means that each leaf grows from a separate location on the leaf stem in an alternating pattern..." "There are two kinds: compound leaves and simple leaves. An oak tree has simple leaves. This means there is only one large leaf for each leaf stem."  "Look at the leaf edges. A leaf's edge will either be lobed or not lobed. An oak leaf's edge is lobed. This means there are large indentations in the leaf, which gives its edges a curvy appearance." There you go, folks: the tree has simple, alternating lobate leaves, so it's an oak. Can't be a maple, a tulip tree, any of dozens (if not hundreds) of other tree species. Knoll doesn't even bother to mention that an oak tree has acorns... Now comes the time to identify the type of oak, at least according to Elizabeth – and she says it's easy because

"There are three main types of oak trees: red oak, white oak and black oak."

What an idiot. According to people who actually know something (as opposed to someone with a "certificate in early childhood education"), there are a lot more than three types of oaks. Heck, there are seventeen that are considered "common" in North America alone, not to mention those that are "uncommon"! And this therefore renders Liz's method of differentiating among her three – 

"Rub your finger lightly along the lobe of your leaf. If the end of the lobe is pointed, the leaf is from a red oak. A leaf with a rounded end is from a white oak. A black oak leaf will also have pointed lobes. The difference between the black oak and the red oak leaves is the width of the lobes. A black leaf's lobes are narrower than a red oak's."

– essentially useless. What if your leaf is, say, from a post oak, a bur oak, a live oak (which, by the way, doesn't have lobate leaves), a chinquapin oak, a pin oak, a post oak... No, this is a question that can't be answered within the eHow format (at least within their maximum word count), but Knoll tried to answer it anyway, and failed miserably. That's more than enough for us to award her the coveted Dumbass of the Day.

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