Quercus virginiana (southern live oak)

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Quercus virginiana, photographed by Sawyer Baran — fig. a Sawyer Baran, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-21 / obs. 199471210

Quercus virginiana, photographed by Michael A. Alcorn — fig. b Michael A. Alcorn, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203222150

Quercus virginiana, photographed by Kiandre Reynolds — fig. c Kiandre Reynolds, CC0 1.0 / obs. 199853191

Quercus virginiana, photographed by Leila Dasher — fig. d Leila Dasher, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 198370020

Quercus virginiana, photographed by Clifton Ladd, C.W.B. — fig. e Clifton Ladd, C.W.B., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 196146256

Quercus virginiana, photographed by Ben Machado — fig. f Ben Machado, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194221735

Quercus virginiana, photographed by Jay Pruett — fig. g Jay Pruett, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187411559

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.

Quercus agrifoliacalled this one 3x compare

Flowering n = 82 observations

Flowering observations of Quercus virginiana by month
Month	Observations
Jan	0
Feb	16
Mar	45
Apr	15
May	1
Jun	2
Jul	0
Aug	0
Sep	1
Oct	0
Nov	1
Dec	1

Peak flowering in Mar, from 82 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 13 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.

Dryopsila virens (Aiton) Raf.
Quercus andromeda Riddell
Quercus hemisphaerica hort. ex Endl.
Quercus phellos var. obtusifolia Lam.
Quercus phellos var. sempervirens Marshall
Quercus sempervirens Walter
Quercus virens Aiton
Quercus virginiana f. virescens (Sarg.) Trel.
Quercus virginiana f. virginiana
Quercus virginiana var. eximea Sarg.
Quercus virginiana var. typica A.Camus
Quercus virginiana var. virescens Sarg.
Quercus virginiana var. virginiana

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
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.