Texas Live Oak vs. Southern Live Oak: What’s the Difference, and Which One Is in My Yard?

If you walk into any given retail nursery in Austin to buy a live oak and take home, you’re more than likely getting a southern coastal live oak. If you’re wanting to get one of our native Texas escarpment live oaks, you’re gonna have to talk to a number of tree farms and professional tree planting services. It can be quite challenging. Most tree farms grow the coastal version. Very few grow the escarpment version.

Beyond somebody just giving you a tree and telling you it’s an escarpment, it can be hard to distinguish them visually just to look at them. You really need to have some sort of relationship with the person you’re buying from and have confidence that the tree that they are getting has been properly seed sourced. In the end, they really look the same. And as they grow through their younger years, they don’t look a lot different.

Because coastal live oaks are more typically planted and not growing naturally, they’ll often have a more symmetrical looking growth pattern with straighter branches and will often be centered in a smart location in the landscape. Where the native live oaks tend to have the twisty, turny, unique looking trunks and scaffolds, often with pretty significant leans. You’ll find them in odd clusterings and in places you wouldn’t necessarily think to plant a tree.

The main regret I find people have with planting live oaks are really two main things. One is the amount of time they lose in the early years after the tree’s planted. They’re slow to establish, and even once they become established, the next few years of growing are pretty slow. It takes them five to seven years of getting their roots down before growth rate really picks up in a meaningful way. A coastal live oak will typically outgrow an escarpment live oak throughout its lifespan, from a very young tree through maturity.

The other real problem with them is that they tend to have surface roots. Coastal live oaks that get planted into pampered, irrigated landscapes tend to keep their roots at the surface. When the trees get to be twenty to thirty years old, they can be quite destructive to landscape infrastructure.

Besides being a good shade tree, I also like to use live oaks as a screening plant, especially if you’re trying to screen a neighbor that has a large building or if you’re on the downhill side of a neighbor and you need a lot of vertical heights to provide the screening. We can get live oaks pretty readily in hundred gallon container sizes that end up being approximately fourteen feet tall in the ground. So you can get some instant gratification if you need it. With live oaks, it actually makes sense to go bigger early on because you lose so much time after planting, waiting for the tree to establish.

Gum bumelias are easy to confuse with live oaks. They have the same size and shape of foliage. Gum bumelias have very large and sharp thorns, which is an easy way to distinguish them. They’re also deciduous. They lose their leaves in the fall. So they can be distinguished when you look closely, but many people are confused by them.