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The Winds and the Woods: March: Beech

The Elm and the Beech, among others, grow regular "buttresses" on the lateral roots that bear the brunt of the struggle with the winds. Often these buttresses extend several inches above the ground. This is very characteristic of the Beech also, and may be seen in a comparatively young tree. THE LEAVES AND THE WIND The relation of leaves to the wind is also very curious and interesting. Leaves are so easily bent that they would be broken by the winds every day of their lives if it wasn't for two or three things. Ordinary leaves are, in most cases, protected from doubling up too much by the fact that they are full of water, and the network of veins through which this water is conveyed -- the midrib and all -- makes a very neat little skeleton that serves the leaf's purposes much better than a more ambitious skeleton -- say like yours or mine or that squirrel's over there. The reason a withered leaf crumples up so is that its cells are empty for lack of water; and the reason a football can stand so much kicking and an auto tire such bumps is that they are well "stuffed" with air, as the leaf is with water.

Where leaves are very broad, as in the Palms, they are divided into strips for some distance back from the margin. Do you see why? This lets the wind through; it's a way of "taking in sail," as a sailor might put it. The cells of the margins of leaves usually have extra thick walls -- a kind of sustaining frame for the leaf as a whole; and in the bays of the lobes we sometimes find special marginal veins -- in the Holly, for instance. Some leaves work it the other way; that is to say, they protect themselves by yielding to the wind. In order that they may do this, they have unusually slender stems (petioles). The Aspen leaf has such a stem. Mightn't we say, then, that the trembling of the Aspen leaves, a characteristic so often referred to by the poets, is not because our little friends are afraid, but because they aren't?

THE BIG BROTHERS OF THE FIELDS, THE ORCHARD, AND THE HOME While wrestling-bouts with the winds are all in the day's work among the tree folks, the high winds are often too strong for the orchard trees, standing apart as they do; and both hot and cold winds are bad for the cattle and the crops and the people of the homestead. So the planting of trees for windbreaks is an important part of the art of forestry. In sections of the West where hot summer winds are frequent, windbreaks, besides increasing the comfort of the household, protect the growing crops from these withering blasts, and, in the winter, not only temper the violence of the gales, but prevent disastrous piling up of the snows. As the violent winds of winter are from the north, wind-breaks are planted to run east and west.