Quercus agrifolia coast live oak, encina

Coast live oaks (Quercus agrifolia) at Lake Lagunita Sairus Patel, 2 Mar 2023

Quercus agrifolia, Braun Music Center, showing striated acorns and cupped leaves with tufts of hair in the vein axils on the undersides. Sairus Patel, 14 Oct 2024

Truly indigenous to campus and by far its most abundant tree, coast live oak is the one to know if you learn only a single tree here. Stand anywhere and look around; chances are one is in sight – evergreen (the “live” part of its name), with tough dark green leaves, cupped, with a few spiny teeth along its margins. Most leaf undersides bear tufts of hair where the secondary veins meet the midvein – an important diagnostic missed by the European botanist who first described it. These tufts may serve as domatia (think “domestic”), tiny abodes for mites. The ashen bark begins smooth in youth, later cracking into gray-brown furrows as the trunk thickens.

In March, creamy catkins of male flowers dangle from the crown, releasing clouds of pollen; the species is, alas, rated a “severe” allergen. Female flowers are inconspicuous (most lovers of oaks live and die without ever noticing them), squatting in leaf axils at twig ends, developing into bullet-like acorns 1–1½ inches long. These can be distinguished from the valley oak’s by the cup’s fine, overlapping scales (rather than knobby ones) and sometimes by longitudinal striping.

Acorns germinate all over campus, seemingly pushing out of every hedge. Acorn woodpeckers custom-drill holes in trees and in wood siding, including the ornamental wooden panels on Littlefield Center; I’ve watched them hammering there in broad daylight. The Board of Trustees used to meet in that building, but – perhaps significantly – not anymore.

Agrifolia is a Medieval Latin form of aquifolium, meaning holly (Italian agrifoglio). Aquifolium means sharp-leaved (aqui- ultimately from acer, sharp). Encina, the name given it by the Spanish settlers – after the dominant live oak of Europe – bears no kinship to Encaenia, the old Greek word for a festival of dedication, still the name of formal ceremonies at Oxford and a few American colleges around commencement. Imagine the charm of such a rite adopted here, as Stanford Memorial Church has the Lessons and Carols Service held annually at King’s College, Cambridge, a prelude to Christmas. At the very least, every departmental graduation ceremony held under Stanford’s own encinas should be called Encaenia and include a brief acknowledgement of our beloved trees.

Significant specimens

Pre-1953 photograph of the Pioneer Oak at Serra Street (now Jane Stanford Way) and Lasuen Mall. Stanford News Service Archives

Stanford’s class of 1895 – the Pioneer Class – adopted as its own a magnificent round-crowned coast live oak just northwest of the Inner Quad, then an isolated specimen with only bare fields between it and the women’s dormitory to the west (now the site of the Allen Building). At its dedication, it was hailed as a pioneer tree in its own right, and the most “distinct and noteworthy” on campus. The ’95 Oak was cut down in 1901 to make way for the Outer Quad; it had stood at approximately where the sunken court lies behind Math Corner.

In 1945, at its fiftieth reunion, the Pioneer Class sought another oak to claim and, in a re-dedication ceremony, named a grand specimen at the northeast corner of Jane Stanford Way (then Serra Street) and Lasuen Mall as the ’95 Oak. In 1966, when the Graduate School of Business building (now Lathrop Library) rose on that corner, the Pioneer Oak was reportedly renamed the Alumni Oak, though the name never took hold. At the U.S. bicentennial in 1987, a plaque was installed asserting the tree had stood at the signing of the Constitution, leading to the alternative title Bicentennial Oak. Cut to its roots in 2008 after major sections collapsed, the tree has since resprouted from the stump into a two-trunked form, now nearly full height. Pioneer Oak remains the most fitting name, a living link to Stanford’s first graduating class.

Another of the university’s most storied oaks once kept sentinel at the Mausoleum until removed in 1993, claimed by leaf and twig diseases cryptocline and diplodia. Estimated at some 300 years old, it rose 70 feet, with a trunk 55 inches across and a canopy spreading 120 feet. Wood from its bole now forms the patterned veneer on the round table in the rotunda of Green Library’s Bing Wing.

Other venerable specimens lost in recent decades include one south of Arrillaga Alumni Center (removed 2012), another on the left of Green Library’s Bing Wing entrance (2019), and the Gordon Hampton oak at the southwest corner of Campus Drive East and Galvez Street with the accompanying fun plaque (2020). A replacement for the last, informally dubbed Gordon Hampton Junior, is thriving.

Two fine examples grow in front of Lagunita Court. See massive specimens in the inner court of Governor’s Corner alongside several valley oaks. Behind the Mausoleum, a decades-old fallen tree still grows vigorously, its branches having become upright oaks in their own right.

The Rinconada Oak, Palo Alto’s second Heritage Tree (after El Palo Alto) is over two centuries old, 52 inches across and 75 feet tall, in Rinconada Park along Embarcadero Road. A cabled giant at the north corner of the house at Filoli in Woodside was estimated to be 340 years old in 2018.

Mature transplants

275-ton coast live oak transplanted on Pasteur Drive (it did not survive the move). Anne Hill, 4 May 2017

Seeing coast live oaks and other mature trees in large transplanting boxes is commonplace on campus. Stanford’s extensive transplant program began in 1996 with planning for the Science and Engineering Quad; Serra Grove, west of the Main Quad, was established with transplants from that site.

In May 2017 a 275-ton transplant was moved just across Pasteur Drive to make room for the planned BioMedical Innovations Building. It did not survive crossing the road and was removed two years later.

In 2015, large oaks were removed in massive transplanting boxes in preparation for the David and Joan Traitel building on Lasuen Mall.

A mature coast live oak at Homer Park, across from 315 Homer Avenue, Palo Alto, was successfully transplanted in August 2003 at 35 feet high; it weighed nearly 35 tons.