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. Fngleriana. 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. 
T HE 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 1 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. 
N O 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 0 N. 
the Beech finds its southern limit. In eastern Hupeh and ad- 
