Fagus grandifolia

Fagus grandifolia, the American beech or North American beech, is a species of beech tree native to the eastern United States, isolated pockets of Mexico and southeastern Canada. Fagus grandifolia is a large deciduous tree growing to tall, with smooth, silver-gray bark. The leaves are dark green, simple and sparsely-toothed with small teeth that terminate each vein, long (rarely ), with a short petiole. The winter twigs are distinctive among North American trees, being long and slender ( by ) with two rows of overlapping scales on the buds. Beech buds are distinctly thin and long, resembling cigars; this characteristic makes beech trees relatively easy to identify. The tree is monoecious, with flowers of both sexes on the same tree. The fruit is a small, sharply-angled nut, borne in pairs in a soft-spined, four-lobed husk. It has two means of reproduction: one is through the usual dispersal of seedlings, and the other is through root sprouts, which grow into new trees. Trees in the southern half of the range are sometimes distinguished as a variety, F. grandifolia var. caroliniana, but this is not considered distinct in the Flora of North America. The Mexican beech (F. grandifolia var. mexicana), native to the mountains of central Mexico, is closely related, and is treated as a subspecies of American beech, but some botanists classify it as a distinct species. The only Fagus species found in the Western Hemisphere (assuming the Mexican variety is treated as a subspecies), F. grandifolia is believed to have spanned the width of the North American continent all the way to the Pacific coast before the last ice age. Two subspecies are generally recognized: The genus name Fagus is Latin for "beech", and the specific epithet grandifolia comes from grandis "large" and folium "leaf", in reference to the American beech's larger leaves when compared to the European beech.