Fagus grandifolia

The American beech is one of the great presences of the eastern woods, a large, slow-growing deciduous tree that ranges through rich forests from southern Canada to the Gulf. Toothed oval leaves, several inches long, emerge a clean bright green, turn clear yellow in fall and then a warm russet-brown, and cling to the branches through much of winter, a habit called marcescence that gives the bare woods a soft papery whisper. The trunk is the signature: smooth, silver-gray, and elephantine, so inviting that generations have carved their initials into the living bark, a temptation best resisted since the wounds never truly heal.

The genus name Fagus reaches back through Latin to a Greek root meaning to eat, a nod to the nourishing mast the tree has always offered, while grandifolia simply means large-leaved. The English word beech shares deep linguistic roots with book, for early Germanic peoples are said to have scratched their runes onto tablets of smooth beechwood, so that the tree and the written word grew up together in the northern imagination.

The triangular beechnuts that ripen in fall are sweet and genuinely good to eat, relished by turkey, deer, bear, and squirrel, though so small and fiddly to shell that few people trouble to gather them. Native peoples made far fuller use of the tree. The Iroquois valued leaf and bark as a blood cleanser and an astringent tonic for wet conditions of the lungs, dressed burns and scalds with boiled leaves, and worked beechnut oil with bear grease into a repellent against mosquitoes; the Cherokee chewed the nuts to expel worms, and the Rappahannock steeped a bark tonic to ease the itch of poison ivy.

In the garden the American beech is a tree for the long view and the large property, a magnificent shade and specimen tree that asks for room, fertile ground, and patience. The dense canopy and shallow, greedy roots cast a shade so deep that little will grow beneath, so plan to underplant only at the outer dripline with the toughest woodland companions, autumn fern (Dryopteris erythrosora) or the arching Selaginella braunii, and leave the ground under the crown to fallen leaves. Give moist but well-drained soil and time, and the tree becomes, over decades, the silver-limbed anchor of a woodland. Do not hope to grow much of anything in the dense shade of a mature beech.