FAMILY FAGACEÆ

Genus FAGUS, Linn.

TREES valuable for their timber and nuts, and also for shade and ornamental planting. Leaves simple, alternate, feather veined, deciduous. Flowers monœcious, small, crowded into spikes or heads. Fruit a pair of triangular nuts in a 4-valved bur.

The great family of the cup bearers includes the beeches, chestnuts and oaks—trees of profound importance to the human race. They are the mast trees, whose fruit has fed man and beast from the days when they both depended upon Nature’s bounty. Times have changed, and men have less primitive appetites, but their need of these trees is not diminished, but rather broadened with the advance of civilisation. Mast of oak, beech and chestnut remain the chief reliance of many wild animals. 

There are in all five species of beech, three of which are Asiatic. America has one species and Europe one. Two are native to China and Japan. The so-called beeches of the Southern Hemisphere form a genus, Nothofagus, of twelve species. They differ in habit and in flowers from Fagus, and the leaves, often evergreen, are very small. Nevertheless, the two genera are closely related.

Beech (Fagus Americana, Sweet.)—A round-topped or conical tree, with horizontal or drooping branches, and dense foliage; 50 to 75 feet high. Bark close, smooth, pale grey, or darker, often blotched; branches grey, twigs brown, shining. Wood light red, close grained, hard, strong, not durable, tough; lustrous when polished. Buds alternate, tapering, ¾ to 1 inch long, brown, in silky scales. Leaves oblong-ovate, strongly feather veined, saw toothed, pointed, smooth, silky or leathery, green on both sides; autumn colour, pale yellow, persistent till late. Flowers monœcious, May, staminate in pendant balls, few at base of leafy shoot, yellow-green; pistillate, solitary or paired, in axils of upper leaves, short-stemmed, in scaly involucre. Fruit, October, prickly bur containing 2 triangular, pale-brown nuts, sweet, edible, in thin shells. Preferred habitat, rich river bottoms. Distribution, Nova Scotia to Lake Huron, and northern Wisconsin; south to Florida, Missouri and Texas. Uses: Beautiful ornamental and shade tree. Wood used for chairs, tool handles, plane stocks, shoe lasts, and for fuel. Nuts fatten hogs, and feed wild animals and birds.

We have but one native beech, and it is a clannish tree. Find me a single specimen in the woods, and I will show you a miniature forest of beeches springing up around it as soon as the tree comes into bearing. Squirrels carry the nuts, so do the bluejays, and the wind helps to scatter them. Beech nuts have much vitality and the seedlings grow well, even in dense shade. This gives them a distinct advantage over the young of many other trees. Seeds of sun-loving species must fall in the clearings if they hope to grow. In a few years there is a dense beech thicket, with only large trees of other kinds. When these are cut out the area comes to be called “the beech woods.”

In April and May we may see the germination of beech nuts. The gaping burs and three-cornered nuts lie in plain sight under the tree. A nut splits along one sharp edge and a slender root protrudes. It grows downward and burrows in the leaf mould. The stem emerges at the same time and place and extends in the opposite direction. It is topped by a crumpled green bundle which unfolds directly into a pair of short and broad seed leaves totally unlike the leaves of the beech tree.

In this case the triangular shell clings but a little while to the growing plantlet. Oftener, however, the opening is just wide enough to let the root out. Then the stem carries the shell up and wears it like a helmet until the leaves within spread themselves and cast it off.

Young beech trees are very weak and pale and twisted at first. They lean helplessly against dead leaves and twigs for support But when the roots get a grip on the soil and the leaves turn a brighter green they become quite independent. A shoot bearing true beech leaves rises from the bud between the two seed leaves which soon wither away. In the fall a long whip set with winter buds represents the first season’s growth.

From now on the life of a little beech is just like that of a twig on an older tree. The opening of the long, pointed buds is a sight worth watching. If one has not time to go to the tree every day in spring he may bring in some lusty twigs, put them in a jar of water in a sunny window, and see the whole process exactly as it happens on the tree.

Each bud loosens and lengthens its many thin bud scales and a leafy shoot is disclosed which elongates rapidly. Daily measurements will show a wonderful record for the first few days.

As the scales drop off a band of scars appears on the base of the shoot, like the thread of a small screw. When the last of the scales has fallen this band may be half an inch wide. Each such band on a twig means the casting off of the bud scales—the beginning of a year’s growth. Counting down from the tip of any twig the age may be accurately read. Add one year as each scar band is passed. Often the band is quite as wide as the length of the season’s growth.

It is plain to see that the leaves in the opening buds were all made and put away over winter, and that they have only to grow. As the shoot lengthens the outer scales fall, and each leaf is seen to have its pair of special attendant scales, each edged with an overhanging fringe. The leaf itself is plaited in fine folds like a fan to fit into the narrow space between the scales. Each rib that radiates from the midrib bears a row of silky hairs which overlap its neighbour’s, so that each side of each leaf is amply protected by a furry cover. As the leaf spreads itself it gradually becomes accustomed to the air and the sunshine, and the protecting hairs disappear. Occasionally a leaf that is in a shaded and protected situation on the tree may keep its hairs on the ribs until midsummer.

As the leaves lift themselves into independent life the blossoms of the beech appear. Few people see them. The staminate ones are in little heads swung on slender stems. When they shed their yellow pollen they fall off. In twos the pistillate flowers hide near the ends of twigs. Those which catch pollen on their extruded tongues “set seed” and mature into the triangular nuts, two in each of the burs. Early in the autumn the burs open and the nuts fall, to the great delight of boys and girls as well as the little people of the woods. Though small, the nuts are very rich and fine in flavour.

The beech is the most elegantly groomed of all the trees of the woods. Its rind is smooth, close knit and of soft Quaker grey, sometimes mottled and in varying shades, and decorated with delicate lichens. The limbs are darker in colour, and the brown twigs, down to their bird’s-claw buds, shine as if polished. Through the long summer the beech is beautifully clad; its leaves are thin and soft as silk. Few insects injure them, and they resist tearing by the wind. In the autumn the first touch of frost turns their green to gold, and they cling to the twigs until late in winter. Young trees in sheltered places hold their leaves longest.

The European Beech (F. sylvatica, Linn.) is one of the most important timber trees of Europe, and the parent of the purple and weeping beeches and other ornamental horticultural forms in cultivation in European and American parks and private grounds. It grows to noble size and form in America, distinguished chiefly by the darker colour of its bark from the native species. At home from middle Europe south and east to the Caucasus, the beech is much used as a dooryard tree; it grows famously in England, their beeches being the pride of many English estates.

Pure forests of beech are often seen in Germany and Denmark. The lumber is hard and heavy, one of the most important hard woods of the Continent. The multitude of its uses prevents a complete list. Beech bark with hieroglyphics cut in it bore messages between tribes, friendly and belligerent, in the earliest times. Beechen boards preserved the first records. These were the primitive books of northern Europe. From beech to buch is not a long etymological step in the Teutonic languages. Book is a lineal descendant of the Anglo-Saxon word bece, the name of this tree. There are those who derive the words beaker through Becher, a drinking cup, from the same old tree root. Justification is found in the fact that bowls and other household utensils were made of beech wood because they could be depended upon not to leak.

Beech nuts furnished, in ancient times, a nutritious article of human food, and an oil used for lamps, quite as sweet and good for cooking and table use as olive oil. Fagus (Gr. phagein, to eat) means “good to eat.” Beech leaves furnished forage for cattle and were dried and used to fill mattresses. Evelyn vows he never slept so sweetly as on a bed of beech leaves. The idea is certainly an attractive one, and worth carrying out.