Do you ever hear words in repetitive sounds? I don’t mean you think inanimate objects are speaking or communicating in any way at all, but just there is a noise which sounds like words.
The indicator on the car used to say ‘nutcase, nutcase, nutcase;’ today it started saying ‘Didcot, Didcot, Didcot‘ . I was listening to some music and there was a mechanical sound which just repeated over and over and it was definitely saying ‘copper beeches, copper beeches, copper beeches.’
The proper Latin name for this wonderful ornamental tree is fagus sylvatica purpurea, and it’s what called a cultivar of the ordinary European beech fagus sylvatica. It was first noted in 1820, in an American nurseryman’s catalogue, so I guess beech trees were imported there from Europe.
In Europe you can find beech trees all over the place, from southern Sweden to northern Sicily and from the Atlantic to the ends of the Mediterranean. They seem a true British tree, but maybe they were accidentally imported by people bring beech nuts with them as food on their travels. This might have been 2000BC, but no-on seems to be quite sure. Beech trees, left to their own devices, can live for centuries – the oldest one might even be five hundred years old.
I had quite forgotten as I was listening to the ‘copper beeches, copper beeches, copper beeches.’ refrain that of course it is also the title of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Adventure the Copper Beeches ‘. It was the title of a collection of twelve short stories called ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, published in 1892.
Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of copper beech trees, so my featured image is of an ordinary but very beautiful autumn ordinary beech tree.
Lois Elsden 