I am hardly alone among gardeners who have called upon a copper-leaved European beech tree to play a key landscape role. A majestic one punctuates my view each time I look up from my desk or from the dining table a floor below.
In the woodlands beyond my property line, American beeches play an outsize role, too, but hardly one based on mere aesthetics. They represent a key component of extensive swaths of many such deciduous forests in the Eastern United States, providing ecological services to a diversity of wildlife, including more than 100 butterfly and moth caterpillar species, with beech nuts supporting birds like blue jays, grouse and turkeys, and from mice on up to black bears.
Ecologically and ornamentally, beech — whether native Fagus grandifolia or the European species, F. sylvatica — are anchors, each species in its own way a landscape mainstay. But for how much longer will that be a given?