Fagus is native to temperate Europe, Asia, and North America. It is also called Beech and Nothofagus gunnii.

 

Fagus is a slow growing deciduous tree. It can also attain great size and has a broad crown. It is long lived and individual trees live for about 250 years and the oldest known tree is 350 years old. The beech is mainly restricted to high rainfall areas in the central and western mountains of Tasmania, with a few minor populations on some of the southern mountains.

 

The tree has quite indented leaves which are easy to recognize. In protected areas at lower altitude it can be a moderately large tree, but in higher altitudes it's more shrub-like. The leaves are entire or sparsely toothed, from 5-15 cm long and 4-10 cm broad. The flowers are small single-sex, wind-pollinated catkins, produced in spring shortly after the new leaves appear. The fruit is a small, sharply 3-angled nut 10-15 mm long, borne in pairs in soft-spined husks 1.5-2.5 cm long, known as cupules. The nuts are edible, though bitter with high tannin content, and can be called beech mast.

 

Fagus plant tolerates some drought, ozone and a little salt. It prefers well-drained, loamy, and sandy or clay soils with a pH of acidic to slightly alkaline (6.8-7.7). It requires full sun for sylvatica types, Full Sun to shade for grandi flora type. It is subject to aphid, borers, caterpillars, scale pests. It usually has none serious provided soil is not compacted and is well-drained.  Sometimes Powdery mildew is seen and causes a white coating on the leaves. The plant is propagated by grafting with some propagators being very successful and others having mixed results.

 

Fagus is also quite useful for hedging as it responds well to shearing. Fagus turns a spectacular range of autumn colors, from rust red through to brilliant gold, during late April and May. Fagus is commonly grown as an ornamental tree is the European Beech (Fagus sylvatica), widely cultivated in North America as well as its native Europe. The European species yields a widely used timber, an easy-to-work utility wood.

 

Did you know?

·        Fagus is one of the oldest genera of flowering plants in the world with a fossil record stretching back 80 million years.

·        The name Nothofagus comes from the Latin 'nothus' meaning false and 'fagus' meaning beech.