Quercus agrifolia

Coast live oak, encina, Encina

Family: Fagaceae · Type: tree · Native

Coast live oak is a native evergreen tree found throughout coastal California in woodlands, chaparral, and mixed evergreen forests at elevations from sea level to 1,500 meters. Flowering in spring, this tree produces inconspicuous greenish-yellow flowers characteristic of oak species. Growing to heights of 10 to 25 meters with a wide, spreading canopy and deeply furrowed gray bark that becomes checkered with age, it develops a distinctive broad and rounded crown. Its leaves are widely elliptic to round, 2.5 to 6 centimeters long, with a dull green upper surface and a pale green lower surface, featuring rounded or slightly spine-toothed edges that often curl underneath. The tree produces acorns with cups 10 to 16 millimeters wide, which mature within a single year and are enclosed in woolly shells.

California counties: Orange, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Riverside, Ventura, San Benito, San Diego, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, Sonoma, Alameda, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Marin, Napa, Contra Costa, Kern, San Bernardino, Mendocino, San Mateo, Sacramento, Tuolumne, Fresno, San Joaquin, Solano, Tulare, Yolo, Lake, Del Norte

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.