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The Cut Leaf Beech

Quick Notes about the Beech Take me here now

The central tree was the original organism...
The central tree was the original organism...
...now cloned into a ring of siblings.
...now cloned into a ring of siblings.
The leaves have a distinctive shape...
The leaves have a distinctive shape...
The leaves have a distinctive shape...
The leaves have a distinctive shape...
...growing from slim torpedo-like buds
...growing from slim torpedo-like buds

The Facts

Tree Type: The Cut Leaf Beech is a variant of the normal beech, but has slender leaves with deeply cut prongs, not like the typical beech’s oval leaves. The Cut Leaf leaves look rather like a child’s cut out of a Christmas tree. The leaf buds are torpedo-shaped initially, before unfurling as the year progresses.

Location: The Cut Leaf Beech (and the Copper Beech) are European varieties, but have been transplanted to north America because of their attractive shape and colour.

Ecology: This tree really prefers to be in open space and in full sunlight to thrive. It tends to have quite shallow roots, so it needs to be in soil which will not be disturbed. It lives to be about 120 years old, but can create clones of itself to continue growing.

///wash.fizzle.spurring

The Legends

This particular tree is one of the favourites among the park staff, partly because it is attractive but also because it is cloning itself! 

What looks like a dead central tree with a ring of other Cut-Leaf Beeches around it is actually a single organism. The branches of the central tree after a time touched the ground, and then took root and became trees in their own right, but with the same DNA as the original tree, and probably with a single root system. 

The Cut Leaf Beech is not the only tree to do this. The heaviest living organism in the world is a stand of Quaking Aspen trees in Utah, which have a single massive root system and weighs over 6,000 tons. The cloning trick also allows these trees to live a long, long time - sometimes for tens of thousands of years. 

Make sure your volume is on: "It could go on forever"

Show transcript

The Cut Leaf Beech. You’re the expert on this!

I’m not really, because it is so unusual. So here we have the Cut Leaf Beech. Again, it’s a hybrid. What we’re looking at, if you look into the centre you’ve got the original tree which is now very dead. In time, it folded over and all the branches came down, formed a circle and everything regrew. So you have got a circle of cut leaf beech, which again they are all leaning out, and they will do the same thing again.

So technically we have the same tree – even though we have a ring of trees – they are all actually connected by the same root system which originally came from this dead looking tree in the middle. Which is great for wildlife (fantastic for bugs) but maybe will need to come out!

Yes, it may be reduced down slightly as it slowly falls apart, just for safety reasons.
It is quite a popular tree to plant in parkland, but as a single tree. I’ve never seen one doing this.
It is a great display of how trees elongate their life. They are walking trees – potentially they could go on forever.

Yes, as you can see they are all leaning that way. As each one comes down, as long as it is still connected to the root system when it touches the floor, then it can turn its branches into roots then over time it can carry on.
It is almost like a fairy ring you get in fungi, which (if they are not killed by pesticide or something) will just continue expanding out and out.

Identifiable features…the bark is very much like our native beech. Some people like to think they look like elephants’ skin sometimes. In terms of the leaf, they are like little ferns with little cut serrated edges as if someone has got a pair of scissors and cut snips into them. The buds are small, torpedo size and we have the beech masts which are near-enough identical to the common beech. Great food for pigs, pigs love them [and pigeons] and it would be the wild boar who would be nuzzling around in the old world, eating them all up.

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