An Ode to the Beech, Queen of Trees

[J-B Corot, ‘Old Beech Tree’, c, 1828, Museum of Fine Arts Boston]

The nature reserve of Burnham Beeches, a couple of miles above Slough’s trading estate, is justly famed for its numerous and titular Fagus sylvatica. George Orwell was an admirer; in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936, Gordon and Rosemary, on a day out from their drearisome London life, fall into extravagant happiness seeking a suitable epithet for the beech trees there: “Both agreed that beeches look more like sentient creatures than other trees. It is because of the smoothness of their bark, probably, and the curious limb-like way in which the boughs sprout from the trunk.” The historic pollarding -pruning at head height- of Burnham’s beeches has produced admittedly animalesque trees, but sometimes of writhing human agony. Burnham’s beeches, they haunt the mind.