ARBOR DA Y MANUAL. 
187 
THE PURPLE BEECH. 
'HE large purple beech at Waltham, of which an illustration appears upon 
l another page, is no doubt one of the finest individuals of this variety planted: 
in the United States. Downing, who was familiar with the Lyman Place,, 
does not, however, mention it in his “ Landscape Gardening,” written forty or 
fifty years ago ; and it is probable that the specimen which was growing at that 
time at Throgg’s Neck, in Westchester county, and which Downing declared 
was the finest in the United States, is now, if still alive, much larger than the 
Waltham tree, which has lost a good deal from overcrowding and from the 
garden wall built close to the trunk, which has destroyed the lower branches. 
There is no tree which demands more room for free development than the 
beech ; and a beech, standing on a lawn or in a garden, on which there are no 
lower branches to sweep down to the turf, has lost a large part of the charac¬ 
teristic beauty which makes it valuable. The stem of the beech, it is true 
especially of the American species, has great beauty and a charm peculiar to 
itself, but it is in the wood or in the forest that this beauty should be seen and 
admired; and beeches should not be planted in ornamental grounds where 
light and space cannot be afforded them for full and unchecked growth in every 
direction. 
The purple beech is a tree of much interest apart from its undoubted value for 
ornamental planting. It is one of the few examples among trees where an abnor¬ 
mal bud variety has retained its character for more than a century, through 
hundreds of thousands of individuals, all sprung from a single branch (discovered 
toward the middle of the last century upon a tree in the German forest), either 
directly from grafts, arid now sometimes by seeds; for the plants raised from the 
seed of a purple-leaved tree preserve more or less constantly this character to ?l 
greater or less degree. The seed from certain trees yield more purple-leaved seed¬ 
lings than those from other trees, although the proportion of the purple-leaved 
seedlings from the same tree vary in different years, and among purple-leaved 
seedlings there is always a great variety of shades of color. In other words, a 
race of purple-leaved beeches is gradually becoming “fixed ; ” and if it was not in 
practice more convenient and satisfactory to propagate the best varieties of 
this tree by grafting, it would doubtless be perfectly possible, at the end of a 
few generations, to raise from seed, beeches with leaves of almost any shade of 
purple with as much certainty as different races of the cabbage are obtained 
from seed. There is no reason to doubt, therefore, that the variety will be as. 
permanent as the type from which it originated. 
“ Garden^ and Forest, ” May 8, 1889. 
Like leaves on trees, the race of man is found, 
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; 
Another race the following spring supplies ; 
They fall successive, and successive rise. 
Pope’s Iliad, 1 
