4034 x 6062 px | 34,2 x 51,3 cm | 13,4 x 20,2 inches | 300dpi
Date de la prise de vue:
21 octobre 2012
Lieu:
Castle Grant, Grantown on Spey, Moray. Scotland. United Kingdom.
Informations supplémentaires:
Like most deciduous trees, the Beech features a towering appearance. It typically grows straight and tall to heights that range between 80 and 100 feet. The roots of the tree are large and muscular, and support the large trunk which rises high into the sky, surpassing other tree canopies in an effort to get the sunlight it needs to grow. The timber is used for fuel, furniture, piles, tool handles, kitchen utensils and sports equipment. Beech wood burns also well and is used to smoke herrings. The nuts were also important as a source of food, particularly for pigs! They are energy rich and could be used to fatten pigs up for market. In France the nuts are still sometimes roasted as a coffee substitute and they can also yield an oil which can be used in cooking or for oil lamps. The leaves of beech trees are entire or sparsely toothed, from 5–15 cm long and 4–10 cm broad. The flowers are small single-sex (monoecious), the female flowers borne in pairs, the male flowers wind-pollinating catkins, produced in spring shortly after the new leaves appear. The bark is smooth and light grey. The fruit is a small, sharply three–angled nut 10–15 mm long, borne singly or in pairs in soft-spined husks 1.5–2.5 cm long, known as cupules. The nuts are edible, though bitter (though not nearly as bitter as acorns) with a high tannin content, and are called beechnuts or beechmast. They often fail to fill in, especially on solitary trees. Beech grows on a wide range of soil types, acid or basic, provided they are not waterlogged. The tree canopy casts dense shade, and carpets the ground with dense leaf litter, and ground flora beneath may be sparse because of its thick, fibrous root network. In North America, they often form Beech-Maple climax forests by partnering with the Sugar Maple.
