Beech

The beech, Fagus, is a great smooth-barked deciduous tree of European woods, casting so deep a shade that little grows beneath it. Its most striking piece of lore lies in language: the words for beech and for book are closely linked across the Germanic tongues, the same root gives the German Buche, beech, and Buch, book, because the early runic and letter inscriptions of the north were cut into tablets and staves of beech and other smooth woods. The beech is thus, etymologically, the tree of writing and of the written word.

Beech mast, the tree's small triangular nuts, was historically valuable enough to shape English forest law: the medieval right of pannage allowed commoners to turn pigs loose into beech and oak woodland each autumn to fatten on the fallen mast, a practice recorded in the Domesday Book and still formally exercised today in England's New Forest, where pigs are still driven into the forest each autumn under the same ancient legal right, a genuinely living medieval custom rather than a historical reenactment. The nuts themselves, mildly toxic in quantity to humans due to a compound called fagin, were nonetheless pressed for oil and eaten roasted in times of scarcity across pre-industrial Europe, a marginal but real food source from a tree more valued for shade, timber and its accidental gift of a word for writing.

From this link to the book the beech gathered a symbolism of wisdom, learning and the keeping of knowledge: it is the tree of literature and of ancient lore, and in the tree-symbolism of later esoteric and Druidic revival it stands for old wisdom, tradition and the written record set against the memory. Its smooth grey bark, which holds a carved letter or lover's name for the life of the tree, reinforced the association with inscription and remembrance. A tall, shade-casting, long-lived tree, the beech carries a quiet and consistent meaning drawn from a single accident of language, that the tree of the smooth writing-tablet became the tree of the book, and so of knowledge itself.

Ecologists sometimes call the deep, near-permanent shade beneath a mature beech canopy the beech desert, since so little else can grow on the woodland floor beneath it, a genuine and measurable ecological effect rather than a figure of speech, and one that gives beech woods their distinctively open, cathedral-like character compared with the tangled understorey of an oak or mixed wood. That same enclosing, silent quality, a hall of smooth grey trunks admitting almost no other green life, may have reinforced the tree's reputation as a place apart, suited to old wisdom and quiet record-keeping rather than to the noisier life of a more crowded wood.