Oak — the family

Oak — where to start

Oak is where most people start, and it’s a good place to start. It’s strong, it’s durable, it works well with hand and machine tools, and it’s been used for everything from cathedral roofs to kitchen tables for so long that there’s hardly a joinery problem left that oak hasn’t already solved.

The thing to get straight before you buy — and this is the whole reason this page exists — is that “oak” isn’t one timber. There are three you’ll be offered in Britain, and they behave differently enough that the difference matters.

The three commercial oaks

• European Oak — the oak of the British hedgerow and of mainland Europe. When you buy “oak” in Britain this is almost certainly what you’re getting, and English oak is the same timber: Quercus robur, grown here rather than grown abroad. Strong, durable enough to leave outside untreated, and it weathers to a silver-grey that suits the British landscape.
• American White Oak — a different species group from the same family. Durable and tough, typically more consistently straight-grained than European oak. Genuinely good, broadly interchangeable in structural and exterior work, though the grain character differs enough that people with an eye for it can tell in a finished piece.
• American Red Oak — the one to watch. It looks like oak and it is oak botanically, Quercus rubra, but it’s more porous, less durable, and it doesn’t hold up outdoors the way the white oaks do. It’s also cheaper and far more available — which is exactly why it turns up in price-driven jobs where durability matters.

One name to be careful with: “American Oak.” People use it to mean white oak or red oak, and the two are notably different timbers — one durable, one not. It isn’t a species, it’s an ambiguity, and it’s worth asking which one is meant every time you hear it.

And the provenance question

European oak comes from Britain, France, Croatia, Germany and elsewhere. These are growings of the same species rather than different timbers — British-grown oak, French-grown oak and Croatian-grown oak are all European oak, and the differences between them are the sort that matter to a specification rather than to a species library. That’s why they’re covered within the European Oak entry rather than getting pages of their own.