Smooth grey bark like elephant hide, and long slender copper-coloured buds held at an angle from the twig
Beech — Fagus sylvatica.
Nature · Trees
Beech
Deciduous · to 40 m · 250–350 years
Fagus sylvatica — Fagaceae
The beech is the queen of British trees to the oak's king: a smooth grey-barked giant casting such heavy shade that little grows beneath it but bluebells in spring. Truly native only to south-east England and south-east Wales, it is planted everywhere, and its habit of holding dead brown leaves through winter makes it the classic hedging tree.
How to know it
How to spot them
- ▸Smooth, thin, grey bark like elephant hide, often carved with initials
- ▸Oval leaves with a wavy, untoothed margin, fringed with silky hairs when young, glossy dark green later
- ▸Long, slender, sharply pointed copper-brown buds held out at an angle from the zigzag twig
- ▸Triangular nuts (mast) in pairs inside a soft, bristly four-lobed husk
- ▸Young trees and clipped hedges keep dead brown leaves all winter — marcescence
How to know it
Oval leaves with a wavy untoothed edge, fringed with silky hairs when they first open
Beech. Its hornbeam lookalike has sharply toothed, more deeply ribbed leaves.
Triangular nuts in pairs inside a soft, bristly four-lobed husk, once fed to pigs under the right of pannage
Beech mast.
Casts such heavy shade that little grows beneath it but bluebells; clipped hedges of it keep dead brown leaves all winter
Beech — the habit is called marcescence.
Its Latin genus name is thought to share a root with the word 'book', from runes cut into its wood
Beech — Fagus, and Old English boc.
Its timber turned the chair legs of the High Wycombe trade, made in the woods by itinerant craftsmen called bodgers
Beech.
Quick-fire facts
- •Fagus sylvatica — sylvatica means 'of the woods'
- •Native in Britain only to south-east England and south-east Wales, though planted far beyond that range
- •The wood was the raw material of the Chilterns chair trade; the itinerant turners were called bodgers
- •Beech mast is produced heavily only in occasional 'mast years', which drive booms in small mammals
- •Marcescence — retaining dead leaves through winter — makes beech and hornbeam favourite hedging trees
- •Beech is shallow-rooted and drought-sensitive, so is considered vulnerable to a warming climate
- •'Beech' and 'book' are widely held to share a Germanic root, from runes cut on beech
- •Copper beech is a purple-leaved form of the same species (f. purpurea), not a separate one
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- Woodland Trust — Beech (Fagus sylvatica)