Specialty Oaks, Inc. - Company Information

Company Information

California Native Oak Trees From the Specialists

A typical 24-inch specimen rootball with the soil washed away to show root zone growth.

Specialty Oaks, Inc. grows and markets the largest selection of premium-quality, native oak specimens for the landscape industry in the west.

Founded in 1988, the company grows only oak trees and utilizes innovative arboricultural practices to produce its trees. Our personal attention to every stage of the growth cycle assures the quality of each tree we deliver.

Specialty Oaks currently grows five California native oak species on its farm in Lower Lake, California. We maintain a broad range of specimen sizes to serve the requirements of any landscape project.

The company markets its trees wholesale to landscape architects and contractors, builders, developers, golf courses and local, county and state government entities throughout California. We delivered our first trees in 1994, and have built long-term supplier relationships with many of our customers. We will be happy to refer you to them.

Specialty Oaks has the tree stock, the equipment and the expertise to handle projects of every size. We have a Certified Arborist on staff and can assist you with proper tree selection, delivery and planting logistics. We know oaks and the landscape industry. Our goal is to help make your landscaping project successful.

Our Cultural Practices Ensure Premium Quality Trees

A vigorous, well-formed root system is the hallmark of every Specialty Oaks specimen tree. It is the result of our unique arboricultural practices that begin with harvesting and hand selecting high-quality acorns from native stands of trees.

We initiate the process each year by planting and growing more than 10,000 seedlings in our greenhouse. We root prune the seedlings to promote early rootball growth and then select only the genetically superior seedlings with dense root systems for planting in the field.

The hand-selected seedlings are planted in our drip-irrigated fields, in native soil, in 24" fabric root bags. Each tree grows to healthy, specimen size in the field. During this lengthy growth phase, the root bags continually prune the roots as they grow outward through the fabric. The result is a dense, unconstrained root ball made up of healthy roots and rootlets that are never girdling.

We carefully husband tree growth in the field. Throughout the growing cycle our arboricultural experts prune and nurture the trees on a regular seasonal basis to ensure maximum quality.

In addition, we grow our trees unstaked. This promotes sturdy trunk growth with excellent taper. As a result, Specialty Oaks trees do not need to be staked when transplanted, except in severe wind areas.

When trees are selected for a project, they are dug fresh and shipped in the original root bag to the job-site. This assures retention of the healthy root system during shipping, provides easy, trouble-free transplanting and enables continued robust tree growth.