‘Most lovely of all’, the stately beech is our tallest native tree and creates a shaded environment that few plants can survive.
If oak is the hail-fellow king of the English wood, beech is the ice queen. Oak is one trope for England, hearty, rustic and guileless; the smooth-boled beech is the alternative Albion, the shadow-self, secret, minimalist, spiritual. The Gothic architects of our great houses of prayer took inspiration from the beechwood; the way the immense grey pillars of the trees support the roof of Heaven, the sense of sacred gloom cast by the dense foliage.
The arrival of the beech here is contentious. Sometimes, it is claimed as a Roman import, but beech pollen has been found in Hampshire dating from 6000BC, some 500 years before the Channel departed us from mainland Europe. The beech was here when Britain became an island, even if it was the last of the native trees to colonise the isles as the Great Freeze, with its glaciers and frost-frozen waste, retreated.
Beech advanced under its own steam up to a line between the Severn Estuary and the Wash, then halted; it does not set good seed in the cooler North. To this day, the natural parish of beech is southern England, southern Wales; neutral, slightly acidic soil is its preferred habitat, with the free-draining limestone of the Cotswolds, the Downs and the Chilterns particular bastions. The tree, however, will stand in heavy, chill dirt if need be. The Queen has her fortitude.
Most of our beech woodlands are such recent and intentional plantings; the stately beech tree became a fashionable accessory to stately parkland in the 18th century, set out in groves and avenues. The English can prettify landscape like few others; a beech ‘hangar’ on the Downs has set many a poet and naturalist into fluttery exaltation. The Revd Gilbert White of Selborne, pondering the beech hangars around his Hampshire home, was moved to write Fagus sylvatica is ‘the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs’. The crowning aesthetic glory is the copper colour of the autumn leaves before they fall — when beech trees turn into burning towers.
Before becoming an item in landscape design, the beech’s easily turned wood was a staple of the furniture industry, with High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, being the acknowledged ‘chair capital of Britain’.
A porcine feast: pigs in the New Forest relish the pannage months. Credit: Jacky Parker via Alamy
It is a beech’s nature to grow majestically high and it is our tallest native tree, the record being 144ft for a beech in Newtimber Woods at Devil’s Dyke in West Sussex. Yet it is nothing if not amenable; it may be trimmed into a hedge if clipped regularly, promoting ‘marcescence’ (year-round cover), and it may be pollarded, pruned at head height.
Here lies the fame of Burnham Beeches, near Slough in Berkshire, which holds perhaps our greatest collection of veteran pollarded oak and beech trees. The pollards were cut repeatedly for centuries, about every 15–25 years. Cutting stopped about 200 years ago and this lapse in management meant that, by the late 1980s, the pollard branches had become large and heavy. The result is a gallery of grotesque arboreal sculptures that possess the mind. The beech pollards writhe hauntingly, distortedly, like humans trapped in agony.
Our relationship with the beech is close, surpassed only by our reliance on oak. Slabs of beech bark, etched with Teutonic graffiti, may have been our first books and etymologists liken ‘book’ to the Old English boc for beech. The Ancient Greeks believed beech nuts were the first food eaten by humans; the Fagus in the scientific name stems from the Greek phegos, meaning ‘edible’. Even during the Second World War, children were encouraged to collect beech nuts and offered about 7/6d (about £15) for a hundredweight (about 110lb). The nuts were shelled and fed to pigs, a static version of the antique practice of ‘pannage’, whereby the pigs themselves worked their way across the woodland floor in autumn to forage on beech nuts and acorns.
In so-called mast years, when the fruit of beech is plentiful, the wild things take their fill, among them the jay, the scream of which is a definitive beechwood sound; another is the shivery trill of the spring-arrived wood warbler. Such is the bareness of the beechwood that the calls of birds echo off the stone columns of the trees, before dwindling away through the cavernous interior.
Food for thought: What to do with beechnuts
Beechnut kernels are sharply triangular and come packed in a bristly husk. Some 30%-plus of the beech kernel comprises a thick, sweetish yellow oil that is excellent for frying. To extract the oil, pulverise the nuts in an electric grinder or have a Joe Wicks work-out by mashing them in a mortar with a pestle. Squeeze the resultant pulp through a sieve or muslin bag — or, failing these, a pair of washed stockings. About 3lb of mast should give you some 250g of oil.
The laziest way to savour beech nuts, however, is to roast them. Simply remove the kernels, place on a baking sheet and sprinkle with olive oil. Bake at 180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4 until golden. Drain on kitchen towel, toss in ground sea salt and serve as a party nibble.
In the summer beechwood, the thickness of the foliage on the tree can cut off as much as 80% of sunlight. Dense above, dense below: the fallen leaves beneath the tree can be a yard deep. These twin conditions prevent most plants from growing, so only specialist, shade-tolerant plants can survive beneath a beech canopy, among them wood anemone, bird’s-nest orchid, dog’s mercury, white helleborine, the rare red helleborine and the enigmatically named enchanter’s nightshade.
In the shade of beechwood, the mushroom hunter is likely to find enchantment. The roots of the tree are shallow — it is prone to being felled by winter storms — but complex, partnering with ectomycorrhizal fungi to obtain nutrients and thus sprout mushrooms: beech tuft, horn of plenty, boletes, chanterelles and agarics proliferate. Native truffles grow there.
Bracket fungi, cascades of semicircular verandas, abound, among them the artist’s bracket fungi. Ganoderma applanatum is woody brown on top and the underside white — marvellously, this can be written or drawn on with a sharp point, hence the common name (the scratch marks turn brown). I was once tempted, at Burnham Beeches, to doodle on the underneath of G. applanatum, but when I bent down, I saw someone had beaten me to it and scrawled ‘ME!’ In a beech wood, English Nature’s own cathedral, such a cryptic, existential statement seemed entirely apposite.
John Lewis-Stempel has twice been crowed winner of the Wainwright prize for nature writing, and was the 2016 BSME Columnist of the Year. His new book, ‘England: A Natural History’, explores 12 distinctive habitats of England
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