Tree ID for Franklin County Landowners

One of the most common phone calls we get goes like this: “I think I have a black walnut. Or maybe a butternut. Or — actually, I’m not totally sure.” That’s a good phone call to make. The difference between a black walnut and a butternut, in terms of what a Franklin County mill will pay for a mature tree, can be ten to one. The difference between white oak and red oak is currently closer to three to one and moving. If you can’t tell which is which, you are flying blind when someone offers you a number.

This guide is a plain-English field walk-through of the four species that matter most on Franklin County properties — walnut, oak, cherry, and maple — and the look-alikes that most commonly trip people up. You don’t need a field guide or a forestry app. You just need to stand under the tree and work through the checks in order.

The 30-second version

• Black walnut vs. butternut: crush a leaflet. Walnut smells strongly nutty; butternut is mild. Walnut nuts are round; butternut nuts are oblong.
• White oak vs. red oak: look at the leaf lobes. White oak has rounded lobes with no bristles. Red oak has pointed lobes with tiny bristle tips.
• Black cherry vs. choke cherry or pin cherry: look at the bark on a mature trunk. Black cherry has distinctive “burnt potato chip” scaly dark bark. The others are smoother.
• Hard maple (sugar maple) vs. soft maple (red or silver): look at the leaf sinuses (the valleys between lobes). Hard maple has smooth, U-shaped sinuses. Soft maple has sharp, V-shaped sinuses with toothed edges.

Black walnut (Juglans nigra) — and why you probably don't have butternut

Most large walnut-family trees in Franklin County are black walnut. Butternut (white walnut, Juglans cinerea) used to be common in the region but has been largely wiped out by butternut canker disease since the 1990s. If you think you have a butternut, it is much more likely to be (a) a black walnut or (b) a young hybrid. Actual healthy mature butternuts are now rare enough that finding one is worth a specialist’s visit.

How to confirm black walnut:

• Leaves: compound, 15–23 leaflets per leaf (more than almost anything else you’ll find in our woods), leaflets lance-shaped and finely toothed.
• The nutty smell test: crush a leaflet between your fingers. Black walnut has a strong, distinctive, almost medicinal nutty smell. Butternut is much milder. Tree of heaven (Ailanthus), which has similar compound leaves and is often mistaken for walnut by non-woodsmen, smells like burned peanut butter — unpleasant and unmistakable.
• Fruit: round green fruit about the size of a tennis ball, in late summer and fall. Butternut fruit is clearly oblong/egg-shaped, not round.
• Bark: deeply furrowed, dark gray-brown on mature trees, with long diamond-shaped ridges. Younger trees have smoother bark.
• Twigs: cut a small twig. Black walnut has a chambered pith (the core of the twig) that looks like a tiny ladder of creamy-colored chambers. Butternut’s chambered pith is darker. This is the most definitive check if you have pruning shears handy.

White oak vs. red oak (and the rest of the oak family)

“Oak” is two very different things economically in 2026. White oak is surging because of bourbon cooperage demand; red oak is soft because export markets have not recovered. A 28′′ DBH white oak and a 28′′ DBH red oak in the same back yard can be worth a factor of three different. So this is a distinction worth getting right.

The good news: the two groups are fundamentally different and easy to tell apart once you know the trick.

The single most reliable test: leaf lobes

• White oak group (white oak, chestnut oak, swamp white oak, post oak, bur oak): leaves have rounded lobes with no bristles or points. The lobes look soft.
• Red oak group (red oak, black oak, pin oak, scarlet oak, shingle oak): leaves have pointed lobes with tiny bristle tips at the end of each lobe. The lobes look spiky.

Look closely. If every point on the leaf ends in a bristle — a little hair-like tip — it’s in the red oak group. If the lobes just end in smooth curves, it’s in the white oak group. This works on a single leaf, even a dried one on the ground, and it never fails.

Secondary checks if the leaves are ambiguous

• Acorns: white oak acorns mature in one growing season and are usually sweeter (deer and squirrels eat them preferentially). Red oak acorns take two seasons to mature, so you’ll find two sizes on or under a red oak at the same time.
• Bark: white oak bark is light gray and flaky, often peeling in rough rectangular plates. Red oak bark is darker, with smooth vertical strips of lighter bark running between deep furrows — some people describe it as looking like ski tracks. Not a definitive test on its own, but combined with the leaves it’s very reliable.
• Wood color (if the tree has been cut): white oak heartwood is light tan to yellow-brown and has closed pores (you can’t blow air through a board). Red oak heartwood has a pinker cast and open pores (you can literally blow bubbles in a glass of water through a properly oriented red oak board). This is a fun parlor trick and also how cooperages tell them apart.

Chestnut oak and swamp white oak

Both of these are in the white oak group and command white-oak pricing for saw logs, though they usually don’t grade stave. Chestnut oak is common on dry, rocky ridges in Franklin County; swamp white oak shows up along creeks. If the leaf lobes are rounded, you’re in the right family.

Black cherry (and the cherries you don't want)

Two things about cherry: the valuable one is black cherry (Prunus serotina), and almost every other cherry-looking tree on a Franklin County property is not it. The most common confusions are with choke cherry, pin cherry, and ornamental Japanese cherries. None of those are valuable as timber.

How to confirm black cherry:

• Mature bark (the most reliable check): on trees over 8′′ DBH, black cherry bark is distinctive. It looks like burnt, curled-up potato chips or charred cornflakes, dark reddish-brown to near-black, in irregular scales. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll never miss it. Younger black cherry bark is smooth and reddish with horizontal lines (lenticels), similar to other cherries, but the mature bark is unmistakable.
• Leaves: simple, lance-shaped, finely toothed, dark glossy green above. The underside of the midrib usually has a row of rusty-orange hairs, especially near the base — this is a very reliable detail if you can get a leaf in your hand.
• Fruit: small dark red to black berries in drooping clusters in late summer. Birds eat them fast, so you may miss the window.
• Form: black cherry often grows straight and tall in competition with oaks, reaching heights of 60–80 feet. Choke cherry and pin cherry are usually small understory trees, rarely more than 25′ tall.

If the trunk is smooth gray and the tree tops out at 20 feet, it’s almost certainly not black cherry regardless of the leaves.

Hard maple vs. soft maple

Timber mills lump maples into two groups: hard maple (sugar maple, black maple) and soft maple (red maple, silver maple, boxelder). Hard maple is worth roughly 2–3x soft maple for saw logs, and figured hard maple (birdseye, curly) can be worth 5–10x again. Soft maple is worth much less and silver maple in particular is basically fireword in Franklin County.

How to tell them apart:

The leaf sinus test

Look at the sinuses — the indentations between the five lobes of a maple leaf.

• Sugar maple (hard): smooth, U-shaped sinuses. The edges of the leaf between the lobe points are smooth or very gently wavy, with no teeth. The leaf looks like the Canadian flag for a reason — that’s a stylized sugar maple leaf.
• Red maple (soft): sharp, V-shaped sinuses with toothed (serrated) edges between the lobes. The leaf looks busier and more jagged than sugar maple.
• Silver maple (soft): very deep, narrow sinuses, much more deeply cut than either sugar or red maple. The leaf looks almost shredded. Silver maple also has a distinctly silver-white underside.

Bark, once the tree is mature

• Sugar maple: gray, furrowed, with vertical plates that curl outward at the edges on old trees — the plates look like they are peeling away from the trunk from the sides. Distinctive once you see it.
• Red maple: smooth light gray on young trees, becoming slightly scaly on old trees but never developing the peeling plate look of sugar maple.
• Silver maple: shaggy and flaky, with long peeling strips, almost like shagbark hickory in extreme cases.

The leaf-stem trick

Pick a leaf. Break the petiole (leaf stem) cleanly. If a drop of white milky sap appears, it is usually a Norway maple — an introduced ornamental with almost no timber value. Sugar maple, red maple, and silver maple all have clear (non-milky) sap at the break. This takes half a second and is worth doing before you get excited.

What to do once you think you have an ID

Take three photos and text them to us:

1. A leaf on a plain background (your hand, a sheet of paper, a clean spot on the driveway). Include the whole leaf, not a close-up of part of it.
2. The bark at chest height, from about three feet away. Close enough to see the texture, far enough to show the overall pattern.
3. The whole tree from 30–50 feet back if you can manage it. This lets us see the form, crown shape, and branching habit — all of which help confirm ID and estimate grade.

We’ll confirm the species for free and give you an honest first read on whether it’s worth a site visit. If it turns out to be the tree you thought it was, the next conversation is about diameter, clear trunk length, and access. If it turns out to be something else — tree of heaven, silver maple, choke cherry — we’ll tell you that too, and save you the rest of the phone tree.