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O the
great and happy Beech,
Glorious and tall!
Changing with the changing months,
Lovely in them all:
Lovely in the leafless time,
Lovelier in green;
Loveliest with golden leaves
And the sky between,
When the nuts are falling fast,
Thrown by little me
Tiny things to patter down
From a forest tree!
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ABOUT THE BEECH
TREE
Beech
Tree (Fagus)
Beech (Fagus) is a genus of ten species of deciduous trees in the family Fagaceae, native to temperate Europe, Asia, and North America. The leaves are entire or sparsely
toothed. The flowers are small single-sex, wind-pollinated catkins, produced in spring shortly after the new leaves appear. The fruit is a small, sharply 3-angled nut 10-15 mm long, borne in pairs in soft-spined husks 1.5-2.5 cm long, known as cupules. The nuts are edible, though bitter with a high tannin content, and can be called beechmast.
The beech most commonly grown as an ornamental tree is the European Beech (Fagus sylvatica), widely cultivated in North America as well as its native Europe. The European species yields a widely used timber, an easy-to-work utility wood.
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