Compared to some of the trees, the London planes, the horse chestnut and the ash, which are also present at Euston station, the red oaks are poor specimens. This is because they are young. The red oak is spectacular when it is fully grown in an environment which suits it and where there is plenty of space. Nevertheless these ones do have one characteristic which is typical, and that is the leaves. They are lobed, as one would expect from oak trees, but they are much larger than usual. They are, like most trees' leaves, green in the summer, going brown in the winter, but the brown of the autumn red oak is so bright that it is almost red and it is from this phenomenon that it derives its name.

              Trees are beautiful all year around, including when they are bare of leaves in the winter, unless they have been hacked by tree surgeons, but possibly they are at their most beautiful in the autumn, especially in Britain. One of the joys of becoming interested in trees is that the coming of autumn which previously foreboded five months of bleak, cold, miserable, rainy weather now becomes one of the best seasons, because only at this time can you distinguish at a distance all the different tree types included in clusters by their varying shades of brown. No tree displays this changing in colour better than the red oak, and though these specimen are really too small to capture the glory of this tree, their leaves do give a small soupçon of what this tree has to offer.

The red oak leaf in autumn.