Wholesale trees for Austin landscape contractors

• Mexican White Oak Quercus polymorpha Resistant to oak wilt, at home on alkaline soil, and quick to establish for an oak, which is why it has become one of the most requested oaks in Austin. Right on either side of the fault.
• Chinkapin Oak Quercus muehlenbergii A white oak native to the limestone country, so the west-side caliche is its own ground, and the white oak group is the one oak wilt troubles least. Yellow-brown fall colour on a rounded crown.
• Bur Oak Quercus macrocarpa White oak group again, deep rooted, and unbothered by alkaline soil or a dry summer. The large deciduous tree for a park, a campus or a wide median with room for it.
• Live Oak Quercus virginiana Still the Austin tree, and still the right one for most of the city. It is also the oak that oak wilt moves through fastest, by root grafts between neighbours, so plant something else alongside it, keep the saw out of it from February to June, and paint every wound.
• Texas Live Oak 'Joan Lionetti' Quercus virginiana x fusiformis A selected Live Oak with Escarpment Live Oak in it: more cold hardy, more at home on alkaline soil, and uniform in shape. West of the fault, and on any formal row, it is the safer Live Oak.
• Texas Red Oak Quercus buckleyi The red oak that actually belongs on the Edwards Plateau. It takes the thin limestone soil that turns a Shumard yellow, and colours red in fall. A red oak all the same, so the pruning calendar applies.
• Lacebark Elm Ulmus parvifolia Takes heat, compaction and alkaline soil, and it is not an oak. On a street that already has Live Oaks, that is the point. A medium shade tree for parking islands and tight streetscapes.
• Bald Cypress Taxodium distichum The tree of every Hill Country river and most of Austin's creek corridors and detention ponds. Takes standing water and, once established, dry ground. Keep it to the low ground on the west side, where an upland caliche site will turn it chlorotic.
• Texas Mountain Laurel Sophora secundiflora A Hill Country native that wants exactly what west Austin has: limestone, heat, drought and sharp drainage. Evergreen, slow, and purple flowers in March.
• Mexican Buckeye Ungnadia speciosa Native to the limestone canyons west of town, pink flowers on bare wood in early spring, and happy in the light shade under a bigger tree. The small tree for the understory of a Live Oak site.
• Desert Willow 'Sweet Bubba' Chilopsis linearis 'Sweet Bubba' For the hottest, rockiest corner of a west-side site: a median, a parking island, anywhere the irrigation is the first thing cut when the watering schedule tightens. Flowers all summer on almost nothing.

We grow thirty-two varieties in all, and the rest of them are on the full list. The east side widens it. On the Blackland clay, Shumard Red Oak, Mexican Sycamore and Montezuma Cypress all earn their place: Shumard is the big deciduous shade tree there that it is on the rest of Texas's commercial plans, and the other two belong on the creeks and the wide medians. Draw a Shumard on west-side caliche instead and it will tell you about it in yellow leaves by July.

Some we grow are deliberately missing from the list above. Southern Magnolia 'D.D. Blanchard', Southern Magnolia 'Little Gem', Wax Myrtle, Podocarpus and Anacua want deeper and less alkaline ground than most of Austin has: the first four go chlorotic on limestone, and the last is a South Texas tree at the cold edge of its range here. They do well on a Houston job and we would rather send them there than see them struggle on yours.

Mitigation in Austin is counted in caliper inches planted back, so the caliper on the quote is a number the City Arborist's review will add up, and a #65 at 3 inches does a different job on that sheet from a #45 at 2. Around 800 trees at #100 and larger are in containers here today. Container grown above ground means the whole root system comes with the tree, so it establishes faster than a field-dug tree of the same caliper and can go in the ground in most months of the year, which matters when an Austin schedule slides into August and the watering days are rationed.

What each container size gets you Container grown or field dug

Contract growing puts your name on specific trees while they are still growing here, at a price agreed at signing, so a job two or three seasons out is bid on trees you can drive out and look at today. About 1,500 trees are growing under contract for one customer right now, so this is a process we run rather than one we describe. The usual terms, including the deposit and the progress payments, are written out on the home page.

How contract growing works