Quercus × schneideri Vierh.

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Credits

Allen Coombes & Roderick Cameron (2021)

Recommended citation
Coombes, A. & Cameron, R. (2021), 'Quercus × schneideri' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.org/articles/quercus/quercus-x-schneideri/). Accessed 2024-03-18.

Genus

  • Quercus
  • Subgen. Cerris, Sect. Cerris

Other taxa in genus

Glossary

herbarium
A collection of preserved plant specimens; also the building in which such specimens are housed.
herbarium
A collection of preserved plant specimens; also the building in which such specimens are housed.

Credits

Allen Coombes & Roderick Cameron (2021)

Recommended citation
Coombes, A. & Cameron, R. (2021), 'Quercus × schneideri' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.org/articles/quercus/quercus-x-schneideri/). Accessed 2024-03-18.

Quercus cerris × Q. trojana. Tree to 10 m tall or more. Young shoots tomentose, glabrous in the second year. Leaves deciduous, oblong to elliptic or somewhat obovate, blunt at the apex, tapered to rounded or slightly cordate at the base, to 10 × 3 cm, more on vigorous shoots. Margin edged with up to 9 or 10 mucronate teeth that are more rounded than in Q. trojana, occasionally more deeply lobed. They are glossy dark green and more or less glabrous above when mature, paler and tomentose beneath, turning yellow in autumn. Petiole to 12 mm long. Cupules hemispherical, sessile, up to 21 × 27 mm, covered with long scales, the apical ones erect, the lower recurved. Acorns oblong-ovoid, to 3.2 × 1.7 cm, about half enclosed in the cup and ripening the second year. (Vierhapper 1912)

Distribution  AlbaniaBosnia and HerzegovinaNorth MacedoniaSerbiaTurkey

Habitat Mountain forests

USDA Hardiness Zone 6

RHS Hardiness Rating H7

Two trees at Arboretum de Pouyouleix, France, received as Q. erucifolia (= Q. robur subsp. pedunculiflora) appear to belong here. The foliage on these is very variable, some leaves with the regular toothing of Q. trojana but often with more rounded teeth and longer petioles, while others are more deeply and irregularly lobed, showing the influence of Q. cerris. The foliage resembles that of a tree of Q. × schneideri found in the Kasnak Forest, Turkey in 2002 during an International Oak Society visit. In 2020 they were 8 m × 31 cm and 7 m × 20 cm (B. Chassé pers. comm.). A tree at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, England, raised there from seed of Q. trojana (received as Q. × hispanica ‘Hemelrijk’) in 2005 was 4.5 m tall with a spread of 2.5 m in 2020 (B. Clarke pers. comm.).

It was named after Captain Josef Schneider (1877–1938), who collected the original material near Domanovići in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1911. Schneider, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, was a keen plantsman and was nicknamed ‘Wurzelsepp’, a humorous but untranslatable expression – literally “a collector of roots (wurzel) called Sepp (a shortened form of Josef)” – bearing the connotation of slight eccentricity. His herbarium, collected mostly in Albania, contained 26,627 specimens and is kept in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna (Lack & Barina 2020). He was a Captain at the time he collected the material of Q. × schneideri, but his eccentricity seems to have been no bar to promotion: his herbarium is recorded as ‘Herbarium General J. Schneider’.