116 



The Garden Magazine, April, 1920 



GROWN IN THE OPEN THE COMMON BEECH BECOMES A MAGNIFICENT GREEN SPHERE 



This species (Fagus sylvatica) which is as much at home here where it is very generally planted, as it is in its native 

 British soil, is one of the finest of low-spreading shade trees available and too many of them can never be used 



Chinese (F. Engleriana) the trunk divides at or near the base 

 into few or many stems. In the Dagelet Island F. multinervis 

 and the Chinese F. longipetiolata the trunk is usually single, 

 but often divides near the base into several stems. The habit 

 of the rare Formosan F. Hayatae is unknown, also that of the 

 Caucasian F. orientalis, though from an account I have read of 

 the latter it would appear to have many stems like the Japanese 

 F. Sieboldii and the Chinese F. Engleriana. The American 

 Beech (F. grandifolia) exhibits even greater diversity in habit. 

 Normally it has a solitary trunk, but in pastures and places 

 where the roots get near the surface and are consequently ex- 

 posed and damaged, a multitude of suckers (sprouts) are devel- 

 oped which grow into trees and form a dense copse. Near the 

 foot of the Hemlock Hill, by the collection of Arborvitae and 

 Yews in the Arnold Arboretum, there is a splendid example of 

 this type of growth of American Beech. 



THE distribution of the various species of Beech is remark- 

 able, and is a good illustration of the isolation of members 

 of a genus to which I referred in the first article of this series. 

 The Common Beech is indigenous in England and in western 

 Europe generally, as far east as about the old Russian frontier 

 from Norway and Sweden south to the Mediterranean; and it 

 reappears in the Crimea. It is absent from Portugal and is 

 not considered to be wild in Ireland or Scotland though it 

 probably is in the southernmost parts of the latter country. 

 Commonly it forms pure forests of considerable extent, some of 

 the finest of which grow on the northern slopes of the Balkans 



from their base to 4,000 feet altitude. The American Beech 

 is distributed from Nova Scotia to the northern shores of Lake 

 Huron and northern Wisconsin; south to western Florida; west 

 to southeastern Missouri and Trinity River, Texas. It grows 

 mixed with other trees and occasionally, with yellow Birch, 

 makes nearly pure woods. Outside of America it has not proved 

 amenable to cultivation and in Europe only a few small examples 

 exist. 



In Japan Fagus Sieboldii grows from the southern end of 

 Hokkaido, through Hondo, the main island, Shikoku to Kiri- 

 shima in the south of Kyushu, and in places forms pure woods, 

 though usually it is merely the dominant tree in the mixed 

 forests of certain zones on the mountains. The other Japanese 

 Beech (F. japonica) is more rare and I have seen it only in the 

 Nikko region, where it grows mixed with Siebold's Beech and 

 other trees, at from 3,500 to 5,000 ft. altitude. On the tiny 

 Dagelet Island, a lonely spot in the Japan Sea some fifty miles 

 from the east coast of central Korea, grows an endemic Beech 

 (F. multinervis) recently discovered. It is quite plentiful in 

 forests of mixed broad-leaf trees on volcanic soil. I collected a 

 number of small plants but the time was early in June and I failed 

 to get them to America in a living condition. 



NO BEECH grows in Korea, Manchuria, eastern Siberia 

 nor in China until the central provinces are reached. 

 But there, in Hupeh, Szechuan, Kuichau and Yunnan three 

 species have been found; in fact in Yunnan, at about Lat. 23 N. 

 the Beech finds its southern limit. In eastern Hupeh and ad- 



