Call it the social register tree! Something about the smooth, smoke gray bark of a beech seems to present a blank page to the human eye, motivates the hand to grab a sharp tool and begin carving. It’s hard to find one of any size in a well visited place that doesn’t have at least a few letters incised in its skin. Large beeches absent human inscription are usually found deep in the woods or in a well guarded yard. It’s not just that the fine bark cuts easily, but the resultant callus formed by the tree to compartmentalize the wound enables the writing to stay for decades.
My first stop on a recent tour of state champion beech trees not far from my Connecticut home found me in Hartford’s Cedar Hill Cemetery where such luminaries as J.P. Morgan, Katherine Hepburn and Wallace Stevens are buried. Along the main entrance road opposite a pond and just before the flagpole I stopped at the base of the state’s largest rivers purple beech, a tree distinguished for its deep purple spring foliage. With a columnar trunk, it stands ninety-one feet tall and is a robust 129 inches in diameter at breast height. Its gray bark is wrinkled in places like elephant skin. A variety of letters and symbols, including obligatory hearts, were carved on it, though none recently. With the distortions of time and tree growth they have become bloated and malformed, some taking on the appearance of hieroglyphics. Moss had collected in a few of the carvings providing distinctive relief and fuzzy color that made them appear even more ancient. The tree’s tattoos included initials, names, dates, numbers, geometric designs, and phrases cut in a variety of styles and depths.
Beech bark carving is nothing new. “I will try these verses, which the other day I carved on the green
Expressing one’s love on beech bark goes back a long way. “O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books/And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character;/That every eye which in this forest looks/Shall see thy virtue witness’d everywhere,” Shakespeare’s Orlando tells his love in As You Like It. Until about 1880, it’s said that a massive beech tree along Carroll Creek in Tennessee was legibly inscribed with the following: “D. Boone/Cilled A Bar/On Tree/ InYear1760.” Estimated to be 365 years old, the tree fell in1916.
Standing prominently on a triangular village green surrounded by houses and a church in the Greenfield Hill section of Fairfield, the plethora of carvings on the state champion copper European beech demonstrates that tree graffiti artists do not require the relative seclusion of a cemetery. This double trunked giant, a favorite species of Thomas Jefferson and first U.S. forester Gifford Pinchot, is 104 feet tall and 256 inches in circumference. Some of the lower limbs sweep dramatically down to the ground. The thick trunk is crowded with names, dates, and expressions of love in word and by hearts. Deformed as the tree healed, some of the writing looked like Celtic runes. Though often hard to read, I was fascinated by the inscriptions, wondering what had happened to R.J. Albert from
Worried that carving might damage the trees, I was gratified to find very few recent incisions. I consulted with several foresters and Dr. Charles Canham, a Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, and found that no one knew of any research on the relationship between tree health and graffiti. Beech bark disease is a serious problem caused by an insect boring tiny holes in the bark providing access to a potentially fatal fungus that damages the tree’s circulatory system. While any wound to the bark is another avenue for the fungus to enter, “it would be hard to argue that bark vandalism has tipped the balance much,” according to Canham. Regardless, beech bark carving, however intriguing, is indeed a form of vandalism of nature not to be encouraged.
The state’s co-champion weeping European beech in Danbury’s Wooster Cemetery is breathtaking. It’s a massive umbrella of a tree 58 feet high and 163 inches in circumference with large pendant limbs and an intriguing interior network of interlacing branches and twigs. Surrounded by newer graves, including those of veterans, the stout trunk quickly splits into five
“A beech is, in almost any landscape where it appears, the finest tree to be seen,” wrote naturalist Donald Culross Peattie. He admired the tree for its “strength combined with grace, balance, longevity hardiness, [and] health.” But he also recognized its singular attraction for human carving, maintaining that “on the beech was written, probably, the first page of European literature” in the form of Sanskrit characters incised on bark strips. Facilitating human communication for millennia, beech trees form an unusual link between nature and civilization. In an age when words can be sent instantly around the globe, there remains something about the act of chiseling a message into the flesh of a tree that heightens the meaning and emotion of a few letters or symbols. There they wait to greet an unknown audience.
