THE BEECH-TREE.
[Fagus.[C] Nat. Ord.—Amentiferæ; Linn.—Monœc. Poly.]
[C] Generic characters. Barren flowers in a roundish catkin. Perianth campanulate, divided into 5 or 6 segments. Stamens 8 to 15. Fertile flowers, 2 together, within a 4-lobed prickly involucre. Stigma 3. Ovaries 3-cornered and 3-celled. Nut by abortion 1 or 2-seeded. Named from φαγω, to eat.
The Common Beech (F. sylvática), is supposed to be indigenous to England, but not to Scotland or Ireland. According to Evelyn, it is a beautiful as well as valuable tree, growing generally to a greater stature than the Ash: though Gilpin observes, that it does not deserve to be ranked among timber-trees; its wood being of a soft, spongy nature, sappy, and alluring to the worm. Neither will Gilpin allow that, in point of picturesque beauty, it should rank much higher than in point of utility. Its skeleton, compared with that of the oak, the ash, or the elm, he says, is very deficient; yet its trunk is often highly picturesque, being frequently studded with bold knobs and projections, and having sometimes a sort of irregular fluting about it, which is very characteristic. It has another peculiarity, also, which is somewhat pleasing—that of a number of stems arising from the root. The bark, too, wears often a pleasant hue. It is naturally of a dingy olive; but it is always overspread, in patches, with a variety of mosses and lichens, which are commonly of a lighter tint in the upper parts, and of a deep velvet green towards the root. Its smoothness, also, contrasts agreeably with these rougher appendages. No bark tempts the lover so much to make it the depository of his mistress's name. In days of yore, it seems to have commonly served as the lover's tablet. In Dryden's translation of Virgil's Eclogues, we find the following:—
Or shall I rather the sad verse repeat,
Which on the Beech's bark I lately writ—
I writ, and sang betwixt.
There seems to have been connected with this custom the curious idea, that as the tree increased in growth, so would the words, and also the hopes expressed thereon:
The rind of every plant her name shall know,
And as the rind extends the love shall grow.
Our own Thomson, too, narrates that Musidora carved, on the soft bark of a Beech-tree, the confession of her attachment to Damon: