Search Results for 'Fagus sylvatica'

There can be fewer more pleasant places to be on a crisp, bright autumn day than a beech wood. The sunlight seems to sparkle and fizz as it falls through the lightening canopy on to leaves the colour of burnished copper, which contrast perfectly with the tree trunks’ smooth, tactile grey bark. It’s almost the epitome of autumn. In spring, too, there’s hardly any tree, except perhaps the silver birch, that has such vibrant, sparkling, thoroughly spring-like leaves. Gilbert White, the eighteenth-century English clergyman and naturalist, described it in The Natural History of Selborne as ‘the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs’.