The Beech flowers in April or May. The blossoms are rather more conspicuous than is the case with the Oak, for the male
flowers are gathered together in a hanging purplish-brown rounded tassel with yellow anthers. The female flowers, to the number of two, three, or four, are clustered in a "cupule" of overlapping scales, like those of the Oak. But in the Beech the "cupule" becomes a bristly closed box, which afterwards opens by one end splitting into four triangular silk-hair-lined valves, which turn back and reveal the three-sided, sharp-edged "mast." This mast was formerly a very valuable product of the Beech-woods, when herds of swine were turned in them to feed upon the fallen Beech-nuts. Agricultural methods have changed;
but though our hogs are now confined in styes, and fed on a diet that more rapidly fattens, Beech-mast is still a good food eagerly taken by such woodland denizens as badgers, deer, squirrels, and dormice.
The vitality of the Beech is so high that quite frequently the bole divides at its upper part into several trunks, which rise straight up, and each attains the dimensions of a complete tree. Often such a tree stands on a sandy bank, and seems in imminent danger of toppling over, but its uprightness secures it against strain, and the roots that it sent down the steep side of the bank have thickened into strong props. Many such trees may be found along the hollow lanes in the Greensand district of Surrey, and we have more than once sheltered from a storm under their roots.
We have already mentioned the value of the Beech as a nurse for other trees, and its frequent use for that purpose, but it should also be stated that it is a powerful competitor with other trees, and if these are left to fight their own battles unaided, the Beech will be the conqueror. Evelyn saw this more than two centuries ago, and pointed out that where mixed woods of Oak and Beech were left to themselves, they ultimately became pure Beech woods. The Beech appears to gain this advantage through rooting in the surface soil, and, exhausting it of food elements, suffers none to penetrate to the lower strata, where the Oak has its roots.
A number of insects feed upon the Beech, but they are mostly more beautiful or more singular than destructive. The Copper Beech, which is so effectively used for ornament in parks, is merely a sub-variety of the Common Beech, and all the examples in cultivation are believed to be "sports" from the purple variety, which itself was a natural sport discovered in a German wood little more than a hundred years ago.
The modern word Beech is derived from the Anglo-Saxon boc, bece, beoce, which had very similar equivalents in all branches
of the German and Scandinavian family, and from the fact that the literature of these people was inscribed on tablets of Beech, our word book has the same origin.