Life's a beech

If oak is king of the wood, the smooth-skinned and towering beech is queenand long may she reign over our landscape

- John Lewis-Stempel

Reaching to the heavens: a grove of Fagus sylvatica.

T0 enter a beechwood is to enter a cathedral; the same immense grey pillars, the shared mysteried gloom. The equal stillness, the equal echoing emptiness. Vita Sackville-West knew this, writing about the beeches at Knole: 'Your stone-grey columns a cathedral nave/ Processional above the earth's brown glory!'

It is the other way around, of course, as to enter a cathedral is to enter the vast silence of the beech grove; the Gothic architects of our great houses of prayer were inspired by the smooth-skinned beech and its elegant ability to buttress the roof of the heavens, together with its gift to cast an atmosphere of sacred sanctuary. John Evelyn, the Stuart diarist and arguably Britain's first arbori-culturist, noted of Fagus sylvatica: 'They make spreading trees, and noble shades with their well furnish'd and glistering leaves... The shade unpropitious to corn and grass, but sweet, and of all the rest, most refreshing to the weary shepherd.'

Evelyn's ‘noble' was well chosen. Apposite. Genuflective, even. The beech is the queen of trees' and, in a proper, maternal majesty, protective; beech is shade for the weary everybody in summer's heat and the blue cowls of leaf-shadow make excellent cover against that other inevitable of the British high season: rain. The beech is the umbrella tree.

Oak is the hale-fellow king of the wood, beech the ice queen. Oak is one trope for Britain, hearty, rustic and guileless; beech is the alternative Britain, the shadow-self, secret, minimalist, nearly foreign. The beech was the last of the native trees to colonize the isles after the retreat of the Ice Age.