Is a Bur Oak a Good Tree for an Austin Yard?

The bur oak is one of my personal favorites. It’s one of the few trees in our region that has the genetics to outlive generations of people. They’re not an ideal tree for many locations in Central Texas. While they are native here, their niche is river bottom, not river bank like an old cypress, but river bottom like where you would find pecans growing. They’re a taproot tree just like a pecan. So if you live in West Austin on the side of or near the top of a limestone hill, it’s not ideal growing conditions for them, and you’re not going to get the multigenerational lifespan out of them. They can be a great tree for forty to fifty years on the side of a rock, but it’s not a recommended planting. I usually point people in a different direction if they do not naturally have good water flow in the soil where they are.

The only real problem with it from a landscape perspective are the acorns. They’re very large, the size of the golf balls. If you don’t have a good population of squirrels to harvest them for you, they can be fairly annoying in your yard.

One of the fun things about them to me is their leaf size. They can be a pain to clean up in the fall, but they’re really interesting, especially if you have crafty type kids. A healthy bur oak leaf can be twelve to eighteen inches long and twelve to fourteen inches wide. They’re really pretty interesting.

Planting them can be a little bit tricky. They do tend to be a pretty hardy tree. We have success with them. But because they’re a taproot tree, the root can become very bound in a pot. I typically recommend sticking to younger plantings. A fifteen to thirty gallon size tree is going to have less of a deflected taproot problem compared to trees in the larger container sizes.

Because of how big they get, you do want to give a little bit of extra space from infrastructure. My normal generic rule is fifteen feet of space between a house and a tree. I might push that a little bit further with a bur oak. Maybe try to keep twenty feet from your house or driveway.

They’re popular in many neighborhoods that have been wrecked with oak wilt. They are a white oak, which means they’re tolerant of oak wilt along with chinquapin oaks and Monterrey oaks. They are trees that we often plant in oak wilt affected neighborhoods.