INVERTED WORLD, Oct. 28, 2010

Shot in Plainfield, CT at one of my fav shooting places… another cemetery… :)

Inversion of a great old Beech Tree…

This Tree is Huge… I can’t imagine how old it must be… or how many people it would take to hold hands and go around it…

Canon Powershot SD 550
Auto Mode

This is a shot I took of a section of this tree:

From Wikepedia:

Beech
Family: Fagaceae

Genus: Fagus
Fagus grandifolia – American Beech

Beech (Fagus) is a genus of ten species of deciduous trees in the family Fagaceae, native to temperate Europe, Asia and North America.

Habit
The leaves of beech trees are entire or sparsely toothed, from 5–15 cm long and 4–10 cm broad. The flowers are small single-sex (monoecious), the female flowers borne in pairs, the male flowers wind-pollinated catkins, produced in spring shortly after the new leaves appear. The bark is smooth and light gray. The fruit is a small, sharply three–angled nut 10–15 mm long, borne singly or in pairs in soft-spined husks 1.5–2.5 cm long, known as cupules. The nuts are edible, though bitter (though not nearly as bitter as acorns) with a high tannin content, and are called beechmast. Most beeches have green leaves, but some are red, the fagus silvatica.

Beech grows on a wide range of soil types, acid or basic, provided they are not waterlogged. The tree canopy casts dense shade, and carpets the ground with dense leaf litter, and the ground flora beneath may be sparse.

In North America, they often form Beech-Maple climax forests by partnering with the Sugar Maple.

Uses
Inosculated Beech tree with a birch.Beech wood is an excellent firewood, easily split and burning for many hours with bright but calm flames. Chips of beech wood are used in the brewing of Budweiser beer as a fining agent. Beech logs are burned to dry the malts used in some German smoked beers, giving the beers their typical flavor. Beech is also used to smoke some cheeses.

Beech wood is not commonly used for furniture making, as it is not dimensionally stable in the presence of varying moisture levels. However, it is this property that gives it an advantage in the making of wood biscuits used in joining other pieces of wood together, as water-based glue will swell the biscuit tightly into the cut slots.

Some drums are made from beech, which has a tone generally considered to be between maple and birch, the two most popular drum woods.

Also, beech pulp is used as the basis for manufacturing a textile fibre known as Modal. The wood is also used to make the pigment known as bistre.

The fruit of the beech, also called “Beechnuts” and “mast”, are found in the small burrs that drop from tree in autumn. They are small, triangular, and edible, with a bitter, astringent taste.

:)))))))