Beech Trees Stand Out in the Winter Woodland

In winter, it's easy to believe that Mother Nature reflects the cold mood of the season. After all, by January native hardwoods — dogwoods, maples, oaks and others — have long since dropped their artist's palette of fall leaves.

Except for one. The American beech (Fagus grandifolia).

She stands alone in woods and gardens lucky enough to be graced with her presence, showing off tan leaves. They will cling tenaciously to her gray branches until spring when cigar-shaped buds that have been closed tightly through cloudy, gray and dreary winter days, frosts and freezes swell and push them off.

Scientists have a name for this botanical foliage phenomenon. They call it marcescence. The feature is shared by a few other native trees, including hornbeams and, sometimes, the lower branches of oaks. But it's most prominent on the American beech — grandifolia, indeed!

Marcescence has fascinated me since I read a poem about it by Christopher Martin, an award-winning poet and English teacher at Kennesaw State University in metro Atlanta. You can read about the process of marcescence, the poem and what inspired Martin to write about marcescence in a story I wrote about marcescence for Mother Nature Network several years ago. It is now available on Treehugger.

Native to eastern North America, the American beech can live for centuries and soar to heights of 50–70 feet or more. The tallest one I have seen is a 100-plus-year-old specimen on 300 acres in West Georgia near the Haralson County town of Tallapoosa. The landowner, Charles Thompson, gave names to several trees on the property, 261 acres of which he put into a conservation easement with the Georgia-Alabama Land Trust, Inc. I love the name he chose for the beech. He calls it "The God Tree" because it seems to soar into the heavens.

Most of the beech trees I see in the Atlanta area where I live are much different than this magnificent specimen. They tend to be small understory trees that are eye-catching not in their size but in their numbers.

The grandest display of these in our area a little north of the Atlanta city limits is on a short drive from our house to a popular neighborhood Italian bistro. They are growing in a ravine on a sharp slope that drops down to one of the many streams in our area. Mercifully, it is not suitable for building. The sound you hear in the video is from cars driving by just a few feet away. What a shame, I thought, as I admired this wooded winter scape, that people drive by without, I am sure, giving a glance at this natural phenomenon.

So why is it important, you might wonder, to appreciate and have a basic understanding of decreasing natural beauty, particularly in America's urban areas? After all, understanding why beech leaves hang onto the trees during winter won't buy you a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread at the grocery. But, it will serve as a reminder and a source of appreciation for what a small sample size of the natural world was intended to look like, and, in fact once did. And maybe that sense of appreciation will serve as inspiration to preserve what is left.

In my mind, the sight of American beech trees in a winter forested area is not only a source of beauty but also of mystery. With all of the technology at our fingertips and goals of walking again on the moon and colonizing Mars, my research indicates botanists have only theories rather than a thorough understanding about something as simple as why the American beech retains its leaves in winter.

Here's a theory I find interesting and plausible.

The marcescent leaves protect the trees' distinctive but delicate cigar-shaped and nutrient-rich buds from deer, and other herbivores, from harsh and drying winds and from bitter cold as they overwinter on the branches of young trees and lower branches of older trees. By spring, when the leaves will have served their purpose, the buds swell and push them off.

Makes sense to me.

So why do I see so many beech trees in Atlanta? I wondered if it was because of the passenger pigeon. They once numbered in the billions and overwintered in the South. When they roosted they were so numerous that the limbs of beeches and other trees would sometimes break under their weight. Beechnuts, the fruit of the beech, were among their favorite foods.

That is not the case, says Chris Showalter, an ornithologist at the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta, pointing out that research doesn't indicate that the now-extinct passenger pigeon distributed beech trees. Instead, he says, rodents such as squirrels are the more likely source.

The next time I see one of these pesky creatures on a bird feeder, I'll think about the good they do in creating the beauty of a beech forest in a nearby ravine and try not to complain.