2023-12-03 21:00:56
There is a huge beech tree near our future house. Old friends and new neighbors alike think it is a beautiful tree, but they always ask us whether we should leave it there. It has no protected status, hangs over the roof with its huge branches and might lift the house with its roots. He might crush the house, top and bottom.
We did not think of such disaster. We thought: what a beautiful tree! It is a red beech and the beechnuts are popular with animals. We saw a nuthatch and a squirrel slaughtering beechnuts. In the attic we found mouse nests surrounded by empty beechnuts.
We find it astonishing that the giant beech is not protected. Perhaps we should work on that, although he has little to fear from us. The only thing we plan to do is prune a little bit. And rake leaves. For years, that leaf fluttered down in November and piled up on one side, so that the ground there is now a meter higher.
The beech has withstood all the autumn winds, although a dead branch has fallen. The tree even withstood the summer storm in July, when the crown was full of leaves and the wind was blowing straight on. About a century ago, such a tree was planted next to the house precisely for safety reasons. The tree then had to work as a lightning conductor. However, it does not seem to me that it will necessarily save the house if the lightning is diverted by the beech…
An old friend of mine – he gets a little older every year – knows regarding old customs and believes that the beech is a Twelve Apostles tree. Young beeches from the same mother tree can grow into one giant trunk, and that indeed seems to have happened here. In the second half of the nineteenth century it was fashionable to germinate twelve beechnuts in a circle and thus grow a Twelve Apostle tree. All twelve are welcome.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes regarding something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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#unprotected #beech #crush #house #feeds #squirrel
