Golden Chinquapin

Golden chinquapin is an evergreen member of the beech family, related to oaks and chestnuts. Flip one of its long, leathery leaves and the name makes sense: the underside is covered in tiny golden, scale-like hairs that catch the light, while the top is dark green and smooth.

Its fruit is a spiny bur, roughly the size of a large marble, that holds one to three hard nuts. The burs take two growing seasons to ripen, and big crops come only every two to five years. Squirrels gather and cache the nuts, birds and small mammals eat them, and the dense evergreen foliage gives cover to birds and small animals. From spring into summer the trees carry stiff catkins with a strong, musty smell.

Chinquapin changes shape with its surroundings. In the Mt. Hood, Willamette and Siuslaw national forests it grows as a tree at low and middle elevations, sometimes a tall one, but higher up it becomes a sprawling shrub. It favors warm sites with rocky or poor soil and often grows beneath conifers. Fire often kills the top, but the plant usually sprouts back from its root crown. Hikers tend to notice it when they find prickly burs on the trail or catch a glint of gold from the leaf undersides.