Evergreen oak, 20th of August 2017.

Evergreen oak, a little branch

Watercolor, 16 x 10 cm.

If I performed my investigation properly, the painting above represents the evergreen (or holly / hoalm) oak (Quercus ilex). This is an evergreen tree present in Croatia only in a narrow coastal region. Its leaves have a flat, non-wavy edge, they look almost like olive leaves (above; >> click on a photo to show it in double resolution). The tree I found looked more like a shrub. It grew in a little bit of reddish soil, on the edge of a rock just above the sea.

The illustration below (by Walter Fitch) shows a Himalayan oak specie, Quercus lamellosa. Fitch, >> of whom I already wrote, painted the plant according to sketches he got from James F. Cathcart. As a British civilian serviceman, Cathcart persistently and systematically studied the flora of India, although he lacked professional botanical training. Cathcart did not make sketches on his own but engaged native painters for that purpose. Cathcart's studies, with some of his own results, were published by J. D. Hooker in a book Illustrations of Himalayan Plants (1855). Hooker engaged Fitch to redo the illustrations provided by Cathcars. The oak illustration (below) is accompanied by the text:

The present is one of the commonest trees about Dorjiling, and is certainly by far the noblest species of Oak known, whether for the size of the foliage or acorns, their texture and colour, or the imposing appearance of the tree, which has a tall, straight, solid trunk, forty to sixty feet high, and an oblong crown as much above it. The leaves are hardly persistent during the winter, though the tree is at no time destitute of foliage : the wood is indifferent. As with our common European forest trees, the fruit is produced with much greater abundance in some seasons than at others; in the winter of 1848-49 it was so abundant that it was dangerous to ride along the roads near Dorjiling, the hard round acorns causing the horses to stumble. Most of these decayed where they fell, nor did any that I sent to England germinate, for the cotyledons are very fleshy, and the plumule sprouts as soon as the acorns are exposed to the heat of the plains. This is, indeed, the case with most of the Indian Oaks, of which there are about thirty species, very few of which have been introduced into this country.
Quercus lamellosa, Walter Fitch
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Last updated on 20th of August 2017.