Quercus saltillensis Trel.

Quercus saltillensis was introduced to cultivation by Béatrice Chassé from a collection made on Cerro Potosí, Nuevo León, Mexico, at 2130 m in 2009 and also the following year from near San Antonio de las Mazanas, Coahuila. It is grown at Penrice Castle, Wales, where it was 2 m tall in 2021 (T. Methuen-Campbell, pers. comm.). At Thenford Arboretum, Northamptonshire, UK, it was 3 m tall in 2019 (The Tree Register 2025). The largest plant at Arboretum des Pouyouleix, France, from Cerro Potosí, was 7.5 m × 12 cm and in 2020 and had been producing acorns for the past two years (B. Chassé, pers. comm. 2023). It also grows at Arboretum de la Bergerette, France, from Chassé’s collection in Coahuila, where Shaun Haddock (pers. comm. 2021) noted that it ‘takes on this rather bizarre form with wide-flung branches with few leaves (at least to begin with)’. This gaunt appearance is also very evident in a tree planted in 2014 at the Yorkshire Arboretum in North Yorkshire, where it had reached 6–7 m and 37.5 cm girth by 2025. Plants are also recorded at Arboretum Trompenburg, the Netherlands, and at Iturraran Botanic Garden, Spain.

When Chassé encountered this species in Coahuila in 2010 she described it as ‘a very beautiful, elegant tree with its characteristically striped acorns and glossy green leaves, that can be entire or lobed’ (Chassé 2011).

The epithet saltillensis means from Saltillo (Coahuila, Mexico). It was described by William Trelease in 1924 from a specimen collected ‘forty miles south of Saltillo’ by Edward Palmer in 1880.