American beech

Appearance

It is a deciduous tree growing to 20–35 m tall, with smooth, silver-gray bark. The leaves are dark green, simple and sparsely-toothed with small teeth that terminate each vein, 6–12 cm long, with a short petiole.

The winter twigs are distinctive among North American trees, being long and slender by 2–3 mm with two rows of overlapping scales on the buds. Beech buds are distinctly thin and long, resembling cigars; this characteristic makes beech trees relatively easy to identify. The tree is monoecious, with flowers of both sexes on the same tree.

The fruit is a small, sharply-angled nut, borne in pairs in a soft-spined, four-lobed husk. It has two ways of reproducing: one is through the usual dispersal of seedlings, and the other is through root sprouts. This is where the tree will have smaller trees growing out of its roots in different locations.

Distribution

The American beech is native to eastern North America, from Nova Scotia west to southern Ontario in southeastern Canada, west to Wisconsin and south to eastern Texas and northern Florida in the United States.

Trees in the southern half of the range are sometimes distinguished as a variety, "F. grandifolia" var. "caroliniana", but this is not considered distinct in the Flora of North America. The Mexican beech, native to the mountains of central Mexico, is closely related, and is sometimes treated as a subspecies of American beech, but more often as a distinct species. If The only "Fagus" species found in the Western Hemisphere, "F. grandifolia" is believed to have spanned the width of the North American continent all the way to the Pacific coast before the last ice age.