Field Notes—

Beech Trees:

Landmarks On The Time Traveler’s Tour

By Curtiss Clark

New England’s roads are made for drivers. There are few of the sky-intensive flatlands and to-the-horizon straightaways found in other areas of the country that inspired the creation of cruise control. Our landscape was churned up by the Laurentide Ice Sheet 13,000 years ago, and road builders have spent the last 300 years making their way through the chop with liberal use of curves, switchbacks, dips, and rises. Driving is always an adventure; a new world comes at you around every corner.

These days, however, I often ask Kate to drive so I can sit in the passenger’s seat, which in February is the prime position for time traveling.

The woods are open and bare, and from the perspective of a moving car one can see deeper into the landscape than a stationary observer. The rush of foreground trees for the speeding traveler renders them transparent. They sweep by so quickly that they barely register in the eye. Objects deep in the woods, snagged in the slower shift of their distant perspective, become more visible as a result.

So in midwinter one can see clearly the curving body of the land with its various historical and geological tattoos: stonewalls, watercourses, and the occasional erratic boulder. Because the woods of Connecticut are mostly 75 to 100 years old, it is possible with this velocity/transparency trick to get a sense of what the state looked like a century ago when farmers had cleared the land of trees. At the speed limit, not only does one see deep into the woods, one also sees deep into time.

When next you are time traveling in the passenger’s seat, be sure to look for sapling beech trees. They stand out in the woodland understory because they are still clinging to pale peach-colored leaves, looking like bridesmaids at a wedding party, full of hope and promise in the spare winter woods. Their future does look promising, but it has not always been that way.

American beech trees were among the first to fall to the axes and saws of 18th and 19th Century farmers. The trees were reliable markers for rich loamy soil with high humus content — perfect for crops. Consequently, they were the first trees to be cleared away. Additionally, beech wood was superior to other woods for turning and steam bending, and its utility made it popular among settlers for flooring, furniture, and containers.

Beech trees are slow growing, taking nearly 50 years to reach a height of 30 feet. A sugar maple, by comparison, grows twice as tall in the same amount of time. But slow and steady wins the race. When beech trees remain undisturbed and healthy, they can live for centuries and grow to heights of 150 feet or more with crowns up to 100 feet wide.

There was a legendary beech tree on the road from Blountsville to Jonesboro in Tennessee that fell in 1916. Its trunk was nine feet in diameter and its age was estimated to be 365 years. It was more than two centuries old when it got the inscription that sealed its fame forever: “D. Boone Cilled A Bar On Tree In Year 1760.”

Beech trees are making a comeback in Connecticut’s woodlands. These days, in the competitive world of the forest understory, the American beech has been dealt a winning hand. It is shade tolerant and quickly establishes a foothold in litter of the forest floor. And it has an ace in the hole: deer won’t eat it.

With the explosion of the deer population in the state, not much new growth in the woodlands escapes their forage. John Longstreth, director of the Audubon Center at Bent of the River in Southbury, describes the result. “The main understory growth in today’s forest is young beech trees, spice bush, and Japanese barberry” — all deer-resistant species.

The beautiful young beech trees that we see today in their winter finery may end up being the real time travelers. If we can restrain ourselves from once again cutting down all the trees for our current cash crop — new houses — and with a little luck in the natural progression of disease and destruction, these trees just might reach far into the future to remind speeding passersby, generations hence, of another time — our time. What message should we inscribe?

Perhaps sending the beech trees forward unscathed will be message enough.