Look closerPlants
Identifying trees by their bark in winter
When: November to March
With the leaves down, bark is the only thing left to identify a tree by, and three common ones here are tellable apart by texture alone: shagbark hickory peels in long strips, black cherry breaks into small dark curling plates, and red oak runs in long straight ridges. American beech used to be the easy fourth, smooth and grey, and beech bark disease has left many New England beeches rough and cankered instead.
Why this time of year
From November into March there are no leaves, so the trunk is all there is to go on, and low winter sun rakes sideways across bark and throws every ridge, plate and peeling strip into shadow.
How to notice it
- Work on a big tree, not a sapling. Bark on a young trunk often looks nothing like the same species grown up, so this only works on a mature one.
- Long strips peeling loose at top and bottom and curling away, so the tree looks like it needs a haircut: shagbark hickory.
- Small dark scaly plates curling at the edges, like burnt potato chips stuck to the trunk: black cherry. Long straight ridges with deep furrows between them, sometimes reddish down inside the grooves: northern red oak.
- Pale grey and smooth like an elephant's leg: American beech. If a big beech is instead rough, split and pocked with cankers, that is beech bark disease, and the largest trees are the likeliest to have it.
Try this with kids: Touch three trunks with your eyes shut and rank them out loud: which is shaggiest, which is smoothest, which feels most like burnt potato chips?
a canker is a sunken dead patch of bark where a fungus has killed the tissue underneath
Safety
- A thick dark hairy rope climbing a trunk is usually poison ivy, not shaggy bark. Dormant and dead vines still carry the rash oil, so look and do not grab.
- Feel bark with a flat hand, and do not peel strips off a living tree.
Sources
- extension.unh.eduNew England extension source: winter is the time to notice bark, with beech smooth and unbroken, mature shagbark hickory broken into vertical strips, black cherry into scales or plates, and northern red oak ridged and furrowed.
- smallfarms.cornell.eduCornell extension: black cherry bark reads as burnt potato chips; American beech is one of few species with smooth mature bark; red oak is ridge-and-furrowed. Also the caveat this entry now carries, that bark of young or immature trees is often quite different from mature trees.
- extension.unh.eduReddish colouring inside the fissures of older red oak bark, and that bark appearance changes considerably as a tree ages.
- umass.eduUMass Extension: beech bark disease has killed millions of American beech throughout New England and leaves infected trees rough and cankered rather than smooth. Also that trees of any size can host the scale but larger-diameter trees are more susceptible, which is why this entry warns that the biggest beeches are the likeliest to be affected.
- mass.govMassachusetts Natural Heritage fact sheet for Oak-Hickory Forest, a state-ranked natural community, establishing that hickories occur in the canopy here. It describes them as consistently present but not dominant, so it supports co-occurrence and not abundance.
- extension.psu.eduPoison ivy climbs trunks as a thick hairy vine, and urushiol stays active on dead plants and roots, which is the basis for the leafless-vine warning.
Checked against these sources on September 4, 2026.
In the guide for November, December, January, February, March