Is a white oak a good tree to plant in Indiana?
White Oak can work here, with caveats. White oak is native and common in Indiana's upland forests, but as a landscape tree in central Indiana it is almost always a preserved woodland remnant rather than a nursery planting, because it grows slowly and transplants poorly. That makes these the trees most worth protecting on a lot and the ones most often lost to development.
What you'd be signing up to clean up
Acorns are the event: about three-quarters of an inch, sweet, on a one-year cycle so there is some crop most years and a heavy mast every two to five, and they pull deer and turkeys onto the property. It also drops leathery leaves that break down slowly and mat on lawns, plus small dead interior twigs that are normal self-pruning rather than a warning sign.
Where to keep it away from
White oak forms a genuine deep taproot as a seedling, which is why field-grown stock is hard to transplant, but the mature working root system is a wide shallow plate extending well past the dripline. This is the field-critical fact on this species: it is the least tolerant tree on this list of compaction, grade change, and trenching — four to six inches of fill, a new drive, or a utility trench inside the dripline is a slow death sentence the tree will not show for three to eight years.
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