Quercus lobataNée

valley oak

WFO wfo-0000291724 Accepted WFO 2026-06 7 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–g

Quercus lobata, photographed by Nicholas Wei
fig. a Nicholas Wei, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-29 / obs. 201925278
Quercus lobata, photographed by Chuck Wilson
fig. b Chuck Wilson, CC0 1.0 / obs. 197210073
Quercus lobata, photographed by Roxanne L
fig. c Roxanne L, CC0 1.0 / obs. 193243298
Quercus lobata, photographed by Wendy St. John
fig. d Wendy St. John, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 189146983
Quercus lobata, photographed by Wendy St. John
fig. e Wendy St. John, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 189145935
Quercus lobata, photographed by Wendy St. John
fig. f Wendy St. John, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 189146510
Quercus lobata, photographed by Wendy St. John
fig. g Wendy St. John, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 189145659

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 = 312 observations

Peak flowering in Mar, from 312 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 15 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 hindsiana Benth. ex Dippel
  • Quercus hindsii Benth.
  • Quercus lobata f. argillora Jeps.
  • Quercus lobata f. insperata Jeps.
  • Quercus lobata f. rarita Jeps.
  • Quercus lobata subsp. turbinata (Jeps.) A.E.Murray
  • Quercus lobata subsp. walteri (Jeps.) A.E.Murray
  • Quercus lobata var. argillara (Jeps.) Jeps.
  • Quercus lobata var. hindsii (Benth.) Wenz.
  • Quercus lobata var. insperata (Jeps.) Jeps.
  • Quercus lobata var. rarita Jeps.
  • Quercus lobata var. turbinata Jeps.
  • Quercus lobata var. walteri Jeps.
  • Quercus longiglanda Torr. & Frém.
  • Quercus lyrata Spreng.

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.