This is the maple-leaf oak, a rare tree known definitively from only a few locations including the Arkansas side of Sugarloaf Mountain. The common name is descriptive–it is an oak with a leaf resembling a maple. The photos are from Ples Spradley who planted a maple-leaf oak on the grounds of Hendrix College in Conway, AR in 2010 in honor Tom Clark (1928 – 1990) an extraordinary teacher who taught Ples, me, and many others botany and plant ecology in the 1970s.
Though we won’t be visiting the Arkansas side of Sugarloaf on our field trip on April 29, maple-leaf oak has an interesting tangential relationship to Nuttall.
When Ernest Jesse Palmer made his botanical exploration trip in Arkansas in 1923 following Nuttall’s trail from a hundred years earlier, he described a few new plant taxa not seen or mentioned by Nuttall. One of these was the maple-leaf oak, which he found growing on Mount Magazine. Palmer described the maple-leaf oak as a variety of Shumard oak (Quercus shumardii var. acerifolia). Its botanical status has been controversial. It was elevated to the species level by Stoynoff and Hess (1990). Others, including Ladd and Thomas (2015), have proposed that the extreme morphology of maple-leaf oak is likely environmentally induced, a consequence of extreme conditions at sites where it is found. Today it is known definitively from only four locations, all in Arkansas, though populations that may be related have been found in other spots. These require further study to nail down their relationships.
