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Fagus grandifolia Ehrh. American beech
Habitat
Beech is a species that prefers richer, moist, but well-drained sites, mostly on hillsides or hilltops. It is very shade tolerant, and is frequently mixed with sugar maple and yellow birch.
Form
Beech is a tree that can grow up to 25 m in height (though it is often much shorter) and reach a stem diameter of up to 60 cm. In a stand, the crown is small and oval, but in the open, the crown is broadly rounded and quite deep. Sometimes beech stems are clumped, signifying earlier vegetative reproduction.
Morphology
Beech is probably the easiest tree to recognize: it has several distinctive features. The deciduous, simple leaves are borne alternately (or in a single spiral) along the shoots. Each leaf is 7–15 cm long, short-petioled, with an eliptical lamina that ends in a sharp point. The leaf margins have many small, outwardly pointing teeth, each one at the end of a distinctive, almost straight, secondary vein, and separated from the next tooth by a short segment of straight leaf margin. Sometimes, dead brown leaves are held on the trees over winter.
The longer, light brown twigs tend to be slightly zigzagged with lateral buds carried at a wide angle at each twig bend.
The terminal bud is 15–25 mm long, lance shaped, and sharp pointed.
The lateral buds are similarly shaped but smaller;
those near the base of the twig or on short twigs are tiny. Each
lateral bud tends to be offset from the small semicircular leaf
scar on the twig below it.
Male flowers are carried clustered at the ends of long, hairy, drooping stems that are borne in groups at the bases of new shoots, as the leaves are expanding. These stems and flowers drop off after the blooming period. The female flowers are borne in small groups on short stems in axils of new leaves further out along the new shoots. These later develop into bristly husks which open into four parts to allow the two triangularly pyramidal nuts they enclose to be shed, when they are ripe in the fall. Each nut can contain a seed.
The bark is thin, smooth, pale bluish grey, and often mottled with cankers. It tends to darken with age and to become slightly scaly
Bark of a non-cankered stem, 26 cm in diameter
Bark of a non-cankered stem, 60 cm in diameter
Cankered bark of a stem, 25 cm in diameter
Notes
Beech wood is diffuse porous, heavy, and hard. It is used for flooring, furniture, containers, butcher blocks, and wooden ware.
The cankers, that are so common in southern New Brunswick, are produced by the tree in response to the introduced fungus called beech bark disease (Nectria coccinea var. faginata) which enters through tiny feeding wounds made by a small, yellowish, sap-sucking insect called the beech scale (Cryptococcus fagisuga). The fungus produces tiny clusters of bright red fruiting bodies around the bark cankers.
The scale insect and the fungus were accidently introduced into North America at Halifax, Nova Scotia before 1900. The native American beech has no natural resistance to either, so “beech bark disease” and “beech scale” moved westward as a wave from Halifax. In 1961, they were found in the last uninfested county in New Brunswick (Madawaska) and now occur throughout eastern Canada to Quebec and into Ontario, and as far south as Virginia and west to Ohio.
Beech is unique among New Brunswick trees in that it can regenerate by producing new shoots from callus tissue (wound tissue) produced by the cambium around the freshly exposed surfaces of cut stumps. Such shoots occur in large numbers, but they are relatively weak, and it takes several years for a few stems to emerge and grow effectively. Beech also produces sucker shoots from surface roots of recently cut trees, but it is possible that these are also of wound-tissue origin.