Out walking in the Forest yesterday, it struck me that one could be forgiven for thinking that it’s almost entirely beech. The leaf carpet is thick, bronze, papery and almost uniform, as if the whole massif decided on a single dress code. It’s easy to forget that the forest is not a pure beech cathedral. Oaks are here too, in respectable numbers — roughly one oak for every five beeches. On paper, that ratio should show itself underfoot. Yet the ground says otherwise.
The forest floor doesn’t reflect who stands where, but how each species lives its leafy life. Beech behaves like a tight-knit crowd. Its crown forms a closed dome, no gaps, no generosity with light. A beech of similar girth to an oak simply grows more leaves, because its branches carry them densely, right to the outer shell. Oaks are different: wide, airy, lobed architecture, fewer leaves per twig. They let the light through, and they let the forest floor show itself.
Then there’s the moment of falling. A beech leaf is neat, smooth and surprisingly buoyant. It skims away down a slope, flocks into dips, drifts into paths. Oak leaves crash out of the tree like heavy punctuation marks and land close to home. You’ll find them right under the parent tree, loyal to the roots that fed them.
And once on the ground? The beech leaf lingers. It is waxy, slow to rot, stubborn in autumn, patient in winter. Oak leaves break sooner, fragment, give themselves up to the soil faster. So what remains visible, walkable, kickable, is beech — a long-lasting veneer that hides the true mix of the forest.
Incidentally, the overall make-up of the Forest is (from houtinfobois.be) around 74 % beech, 16 % native oaks, 8 % conifers (pines, firs and possibly most numerous, Larch), 2 % other broadleaves such as maples, ash, birch, cherry, and lime. Certainly this varies locally, on the fringes of the Forest near me there is a substantial amount of the primary/secondary coloniser, the birch.
The photo shows a solitary oak leaf and a scattering of fine larch needles against the backdrop of beech on a path near me.
What about near you?