Life’s a beech
If oak is king of the wood, the smooth-skinned and towering beech is queen– and long may she reign over our landscape, declares John Lewis-stempel
TO enter a beechwood is to enter a cathedral; the same immense grey pillars, the shared mysteried gloom. The equal stillness, the equal echoing emptiness. Vita Sackville-west knew this, writing about the beeches at Knole: ‘Your stone-grey columns a cathedral nave/ Processional above the earth’s brown glory!’
It is the other way around, of course, as to enter a cathedral is to enter the vast silence of the beech grove; the Gothic architects of our great houses of prayer were inspired by the smooth-skinned beech and its elegant ability to buttress the roof of the heavens, together with its gift to cast an atmosphere of sacred sanctuary. John Evelyn, the Stuart diarist and arguably Britain’s first arboriculturist, noted of Fagus sylvatica: ‘They make spreading trees, and noble shades with their well furnish’d and glistering leaves… The shade unpropitious to corn and grass, but sweet, and of all the rest, most refreshing to the weary shepherd.’
Evelyn’s ‘noble’ was well chosen. Apposite. Genuflective, even. The beech is ‘the queen of trees’ and, in a proper, maternal majesty, protective; beech is shade for the weary everybody in summer’s heat and the blue cowls
Facing page: Reaching to the heavens: a grove of Fagus sylvatica. Following
pages: An ancient beech in Everlanes Woods near Milborne Port, Somerset
of leaf-shadow make excellent cover against that other inevitable of the British high season: rain. The beech is the umbrella tree.
Oak is the hale-fellow king of the wood, beech the ice queen. Oak is one trope for Britain, hearty, rustic and guileless; beech is the alternative Britain, the shadow-self, secret, minimalist, nearly foreign. The beech was the last of the native trees to colonise the isles after the retreat of the Ice Age.
To this day, its natural reach is southern England, southern Wales and the free-draining limestone of the Cotswolds, its bastion. Other beechwoods dominate the crest of chalk country, meaning the Downs and the Chiltern Hills. But the tree will stand heavy, chill dirt. John Holliday of Staffordshire successfully planted some 94,000 beech in 1791.
Most of our beech woodlands are such recent and intentional plantings; the stately tree became a fashionable accessory to stately parkland in the 18th century and, before that, its dense, easily turned wood was a staple of the furniture industry (especially around High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, the ‘chair capital of Britain’). Earlier still, in the Middle Ages, beech was nurtured for its firewood and for its nuts, with pigs in autumn sent to forage this fallen free food of the tree, a system institutionalised as ‘pannage’ (which continues still in the New Forest).
Yet some of our beech woods have ancient roots; the very name of Buckholt Wood in the Cotswolds derives from the Saxon for ‘beech wood’ and the woodland there is of such antiquity it likely sprang from the original wildwood. Deep in the Arthurian mist, the River Fowey in Cornwall was named for its beech stands; ‘fowey’ being a Cornish associate of the Old Welsh for beech, ffawydden.
Under the spreading beech tree, with its dense summer canopy, little grows. The aspect of beechwood is ‘open’, with long, clear views along an uncluttered copper floor. The little sound tends to the pure. In The Unknown Bird, Edward Thomas wrote: ‘Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard/ If others sang; but others never sang/in the great beech-wood all that May and June…’
The scenes of beechwood are immemorial, still photographs in the mind: red stags barking, ‘carrying their antlers/proudly beneath the antlered autumn branches’ (Sackvillewest again); the hallucination of pools of bluebells in full spring flower (the beechwood specialist Hyacinthoides non-scripta overcomes the problem of shade by flowering before the tree comes into leaf); the fairy-tale enchantment of chanterelles and fly agarics poking through the fallen October leaves; the crackle of beechnuts (‘mast’) underfoot, the split of the prickly shell revealing sheeny triangular kernels (such precise, strange geometry); the ruins of the silent, bare beechwood in winter’s mist.
If the flora of the dark interior of the beechwood floor is sparse, it is singularly rich, the home of wood anemone, bird’s-nest orchid and the slender and rare red helleborine. As well as man’s pigs, Man himself has feasted on beechnuts in extremis and epicureanism (see box). The smooth-skinned,
To enter a cathedral is to enter the silence of the beech grove; architects were inspired by its atmosphere of sacred sanctuary
smooth-limbed beech is a tree for the intellect (one admires beech, one loves oak) and it is curiously unencumbered by superstition, with the exception that its forked twigs were once used for divining.
It is entirely appropriate that Fagus sylvatica is reputed to be the means of our first books, slices of beechwood carved with Teutonic characters. Language reflects this connection. The English ‘book’ is derived from the Old English boc. German uses Buche for beech, which later became Buch (book). Bok in Swedish refers to both beech and book. Indeed, as many a rural graffiti artist has discovered over the millennia, the bole of beech is the medium to carve messages of love and existence.
The smooth-skinned, smooth-limbed beech is a tree for the intellect and it is curiously unencumbered by superstition
Epitome of English spring: bluebells lap the boles of beeches in a Wiltshire wood
It is the nature of beech to grow majestically high, the record being 144ft for a beech in Newtimber Woods on the National Trust’s Devil’s Dyke estate in West Sussex. The beech is Britain’s tallest native tree. Yet beech may be pollarded (pruned at head height), as with the famous Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire (the latter another ancient toponym derived from Old English bece for beech), and it may be trimmed into a hedge. If clipped regularly, ‘marcescence’—the persisting of leaves the year round—is promoted. The tallest and longest hedge in the world, 1,740ft long and 120ft high, is the Meikleour beech hedge north of Perth in Scotland, planted in the fateful Jacobite year of 1745. Fagus sylvatica is nothing if not amenable.
The naturalist Gilbert White of Selborne, on pondering the beech hangars around his Hampshire home, was moved to write that Fagus sylvatica is ‘the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous bough’. The beech is indeed lovely and not only for its arboreal architecture, to which may be added the burst of emerald leaves in April and that seamless, burnished copper carpet of beechwood in November (surely beech is the tree sans pareil of the British autumn aesthetic?). As a people, we use the beech less than our forebears, so her beauty is ever more meaningful. Long may she reign over our woods, our parks, our streets. Our landscape.