Wholesale trees for Dallas-Fort Worth landscape contractors

• Shumard Red Oak Quercus shumardii The Dallas shade tree. Big, fast for an oak, red in November, and at home in the black clay that gives other red oaks fits. The standard large deciduous tree on North Texas commercial plans for good reason.
• Bur Oak Quercus macrocarpa A North Texas native that takes the cold, the clay and the limestone alike, and the drought in between. Slow to start, then the broadest and longest-lived deciduous shade tree on the list.
• Chinkapin Oak Quercus muehlenbergii The white oak of the limestone country, so the Fort Worth Prairie, from Tarrant County west, is its home ground, and it is the least troubled of our oaks by oak wilt, which Dallas and Tarrant counties have too.
• Texas Red Oak Quercus buckleyi Native to the limestone ridges of North Central Texas, including the escarpment through Dallas County. Smaller than Shumard, fully at home in the cold, and the red oak for a thin-soiled site where a Shumard would go chlorotic.
• Texas Live Oak 'Joan Lionetti' Quercus virginiana x fusiformis Live Oak for a zone colder than the one it is famous in. The Escarpment Live Oak in its parentage is the cold-hardy side of the family, which after February 2021 is the first thing a North Texas plan should ask of a Live Oak.
• Live Oak Quercus virginiana Planted across the Metroplex and mostly still standing after 2021, with dieback that took two seasons to grow out. It is at the northern edge of where it belongs: specify the escarpment side of the family where you can, and give it the warm side of the site.
• Lacebark Elm Ulmus parvifolia Hardy well north of here, indifferent to compaction and alkaline soil, and resistant to Dutch elm disease. A North Texas parking lot and street standard.
• Bald Cypress Taxodium distichum The Trinity's tree, and the big tree of every DFW detention pond. Fully hardy, takes standing water, and once established takes the dry. On the thinnest limestone it can go chlorotic, so it belongs on the clay and the low ground.
• Crape Myrtle 'Natchez' Lagerstroemia 'Natchez' Hardy, mildew resistant, and the tall white crape myrtle on medians across the Metroplex. Crape myrtle bark scale was found first in Richardson, in 2004, so look for the white felt and the black sooty mould on every crape myrtle delivered to a DFW site, whoever grew it, and treat early.
• Taylor Juniper Juniperus virginiana 'Taylor' An Eastern Red Cedar selection from Nebraska, so no North Texas winter will touch it. The narrow evergreen for a formal row or a tight screen where an Italian cypress would die.
• Desert Willow 'Sweet Bubba' Chilopsis linearis 'Sweet Bubba' A West Texas native, hardy far north of Dallas, that flowers all summer on no water. For the hottest median or parking island on the site.
• Vitex 'Shoal Creek' Vitex agnus-castus 'Shoal Creek' Hardy, fast and drought tolerant, with lilac-blue spikes through the summer. A small flowering tree for the commercial beds nobody is going to water.

We grow thirty-two varieties in all, and the rest of them are on the full list. Some are deliberately missing from the twelve above. Mexican White Oak, Texas Mountain Laurel, Montezuma Cypress, Anacua, Palo Verde 'Desert Museum' and Podocarpus are Central and South Texas trees on our list, and we would rather say so than ship them north of Waco: a long freeze cuts them back or takes them outright. Mexican White Oak, the oak wilt answer in Austin and San Antonio, is rated for a zone 7 winter on paper, and young trees burn in a long freeze all the same. If a North Texas plan wants an oak that oak wilt troubles least, Chinkapin and Bur are the ones we would send.

Dallas measures caliper 12 inches above the ground on a tree up to 8 inches, so ask for the caliper the way the city will read it, and know that a #65 at 3 inches pays back a different number on the mitigation sheet from a #45 at 2. Around 800 trees at #100 and larger are in containers here today, more than half of them Live Oak. 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 the planting window has to fit around a North Texas January.

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 down 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