The true nut-eater
It may seem odd to include the beech under the nut-bearing trees, to those of us who know only the nursery-grown forms of the European beech, "weeping" and twisted, with leaves of copper and blood, as seen in parks and pleasure-grounds. But the squirrels would agree; they know well the sweet little triangular nuts that ripen early in fall.
The pure American beech, uncontaminated and untwisted with the abnormal forms just mentioned, is a tree that keeps itself well in the eye of the woods rambler; and that eye is always pleasured by it, also. Late in winter, the light gray branches of a beech thicket on a dry hillside on the edge of my home city called attention to their clean elegance amid sordid and forbidding surroundings, and it was with anger which I dare call righteous that I saw a hideous bill-board erected along the hillside, to shut out the always beautiful beeches from sight as I frequently passed on a trolley car! I have carefully avoided buying anything of the merchants who have thus set up their announcements where they are an insult; and it might be noted that these and other offensive bill-boards are to others of like mind a sort of reverse advertising—they tell us what not to purchase.
Years ago I chanced to be present at a birth of beech leaves, up along Paxton Creek. It was late in the afternoon, and our reluctant feet were turning homeward, after the camera had seen the windings of the creek against the softening light, when the beeches over-arching the little stream showed us this spring marvel. The little but perfectly formed leaves had just opened, in pairs, with a wonderful covering of silvery green, as they hung downward toward the water, yet too weak to stand out and up to the passing breeze. The exquisite delicacy of these trembling little leaves, the arching elegance of the branches that had just opened them to the light, made it seem almost sacrilegious to turn the lens upon them.
Often since have I visited the same spot, in hope to see again this awakening, but without avail. The leaves show me their silky completeness, rustling above the stream in softest tree talk; the curious staminate flower-clusters hang like bunches of inverted commas; the neat little burs, with their inoffensive prickles, mature and discharge the angular nuts—but I am not again, I fear, to be present at the hour of the leaf-birth of the beech's year.
The beech, by the way, is tenacious of its handsome foliage. Long after most trees have yielded their leaves to the frost, the beech keeps its clothing, turning from the clear yellow of fall to lightest fawn, and hanging out in the forest a sign of whiteness that is cheering in the winter and earliest spring. These bleached-out leaves will often remain until fairly pushed off by the opening buds of another year.
The American beech in winter
