4 days ago
A Race to Save a Signature American Tree From a Deadly Disease
I am hardly alone among gardeners who have called upon a copper-leaved European beech tree to play a key landscape role. A majestic one punctuates my view each time I look up from my desk or from the dining table a floor below.
In the woodlands beyond my property line, American beeches play an outsize role, too, but hardly one based on mere aesthetics. They represent a key component of extensive swaths of many such deciduous forests in the Eastern United States, providing ecological services to a diversity of wildlife, including more than 100 butterfly and moth caterpillar species, with beech nuts supporting birds like blue jays, grouse and turkeys, and from mice on up to black bears.
Ecologically and ornamentally, beech — whether native Fagus grandifolia or the European species, F. sylvatica — are anchors, each species in its own way a landscape mainstay. But for how much longer will that be a given?
Beech leaf disease, first observed in 2012 in northeast Ohio, has already made its way to 15 states and into Ontario, further challenging both species in a genus that was already under pressure from beech bark disease in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions for nearly a century.
In efforts toward forest conservation, and to support the horticulture community and nursery industry, which have long counted on European beech in their palette, researchers from the public and private sectors are examining this latest challenge from many angles. They are exploring tactics ranging from chemical controls, to pruning and forest thinning and more, looking for clues and seeking trees with signs of resistance that could inform breeding of American beech generations for the future.
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