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Quercus agrifolia
Also called California live oak
Coast live oak is a semi-evergreen tree native to California and northern Baja, usually 10 to 25 m tall, often grown as a shade or landscape tree. It is very drought tolerant once established, and the key to growing it is well-drained soil and little summer watering.
Quercus agrifolia, the coast live oak or California live oak, is a live oak (a semi-evergreen oak) native to the California Floristic Province. Live oaks are so-called because they keep living leaves on the tree all year, adding young leaves and shedding dead leaves simultaneously rather than dropping dead leaves en masse in the autumn like a true deciduous tree. The coast live oak may be shrubby, depending on age and growing location, but is generally a medium-sized tree. It grows west of the Sierra Nevada mountain range from Mendocino County, California, south to northern Baja California in Mexico. It is classified in the red oak section of oaks (Quercus sect. Lobatae), subsection Agrifoliae.
This species is commonly sympatric with canyon live oak (Q. chrysolepis), and the two may be hard to distinguish because their spinose leaves are superficially similar.
The coast live oak is typically found within 100 km (62 mi) of the Pacific Ocean, living on coastal hills and plains and preferring soil with good drainage as well as proximity to perennial streams. It often lives in communities with other native oaks and sometimes in mixed evergreen forests. It generally prefers elevations less than 700 m (2,300 ft), but can be found as high as 1,500 m (4,900 ft) in some places. The oak typically enjoys the climate of near-coastal environments; it has a higher-than-average tolerance for airborne salinity, allowing coastal fog to make up for the lack of rain during much of the year.
Quercus affinis · White Oak · Golden Oak · Scrub oak · Brant's oak · Turkey Oak · Canyon Live Oak · Scarlet Oak · Daimyo oak · Blue oak · Leather oak · Northern pin oak
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Quercus agrifolia by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
