Quercus ilicifoliaWangenh.

bear oak

WFO wfo-0000291321 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Quercus ilicifolia, photographed by Gus
fig. a Gus, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205322221
Quercus ilicifolia, photographed by Matthew Gerke
fig. b Matthew Gerke, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205545336
Quercus ilicifolia, photographed by Jeff Clark
fig. c Jeff Clark, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200631212
Quercus ilicifolia, photographed by Gus
fig. d Gus, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 204700567
Quercus ilicifolia, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. e Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 184237229
Quercus ilicifolia, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. f Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 192143464
Quercus ilicifolia, photographed by Bonnie Semmling
fig. g Bonnie Semmling, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180149180
Quercus ilicifolia, photographed by Jeff Clark
fig. h Jeff Clark, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200630754

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 66 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 66 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 8 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Quercus banisteri Michx.
  • Quercus discolor var. banisteri (Michx.) Spach
  • Quercus ilicifolia var. georgiana Alph.Wood
  • Quercus nana (Marshall) Sarg.
  • Quercus nigra var. ilicifolia Kuntze
  • Quercus nigra var. pumila Marshall
  • Quercus pumila Sudw.
  • Quercus rubra var. nana Marshall

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.