Quercus × schochiana Dieck

For The Hillier Manual (Edwards & Marshall 2019), this is one of the more attractive oak hybrids, colouring bright yellow in autumn, though presumably this colouration will depend on the degree of affinity of a plant to its Q. phellos parent. According to le Hardÿ de Beaulieu & Lamant (2010), the orange-yellow autumn colour is enhanced by the brilliance of the foliage, but the intensity of the colour is short-lived at the beginning of autumn.

Although this is a natural hybrid, occurring where the parents are sympatric, it was described from an artificial cross in Europe. It was found by Johan Gottlieb Schoch, a German gardener and landscape architect, at Wörlitz Park, Wittenberg, Germany, where he was court gardener. A large Quercus phellos grew there, reaching 18 m × 120 cm dbh, but never produced viable acorns. It died in the late 1880s. Around 1884, acorns from a Q. palustris in the garden were sown, and a large number of intermediate forms resulted, showing variations ranging from the narrow, entire willow-like leaves of Q. phellos to the deeply lobed ones of Q. palustris (Schoch 1896). Schoch sent some of these plants to Georg Dieck at the arboretum in Zöschen, who propagated them and listed them in the 1892–93 catalogue of new plants for sale, naming the hybrid in Schoch’s honour. He described the habit as semi-pendent. Palmer (1921) described the natural hybrid and cited Dieck’s publication, claiming it was published in ‘a seed list’ with no description save the citation of the supposed parents. For this reason, the authority is often given as ‘Dieck ex Palmer’, but the 1892 publication does contain a description and is hence the correct place of first publication (Vereecke 2022).

Quercus × schochiana is found in many gardens in the UK and Europe, and Bean (1976) suggested that all the cultivated plants in Europe descend from Dieck’s distribution of material from Wörlitz. The UK champion for girth is at Norney Grange, Surrey, 13 m tall and with a trunk 63 cm in diameter in 2018. It was originally recorded as Q. nigra, but according to Owen Johnson, many leaves are slender and scarcely lobed, and the bark is smoother. A taller tree grows at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, accessioned in 1977; it lost its top in 1991, but was 23.2 m × 62 cm in 2023 (The Tree Register 2025). Larger trees are found in Europe; the largest recorded by Monumental Trees (2025) is a 26-m-tall tree in Knoops Park, Bremen, Germany, with a trunk diameter of 100 cm, estimated to have been planted in the early 1900s. The hybrid has also performed well in Hackfalls Arboretum in New Zealand, where a tree sourced from the Hillier Nurseries, accessioned in 1968, measured 18 m × 69 cm in 2016 (Hackfalls Arboretum 2025). At Grigadale Arboretum, Argentina, a tree planted in 1998 was 13.7 m 20 years later, with a 20 cm diameter trunk (Grigadale Arboretum 2025)