Beech Mountain Quotes

beech

It was the breeze that made her look up, a change in the texture of the unseen, a change in the texture of her heart. She was ready. Charlotte moved with firm footing around a stand of beech trees and onto a moonbeam path. A pearly, full moon glowed over Red Mountain, burning back the curtains of night.

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters' huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

In western lands beneath the Sun the flowers may rise in Spring, the trees may bud, the waters run, the merry finches sing. Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night and swaying beeches bear the Elven-stars as jewels white amid their branching hair. Though here at journey's end I lie in darkness buried deep, beyond all towers strong and high, beyond all mountains steep, above all shadows rides the Sun and Stars for ever dwell: I will not say the Day is done, nor bid the Stars farewell.

That ride was perhaps the most wonderful thing that happened to them in Narnia. Have you ever had a gallop on a horse? Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs and the jingle of the bit and imagine instead the almost noiseless padding of the great paws. Then imagine instead of the black or grey or chestnut back of the horse the soft roughness of golden fur, and the mane flying back in the wind. And then imagine you are going about twice as fast as the fastest racehorse. But this is a mount that doesn't need to be guided and never grows tired. He rushes on and on, never missing his footing, never hesitating, threading his way with perfect skill between tree trunks, jumping over bush and briar and the smaller streams, wading the larger, swimming the largest of all. And you are riding not on a road nor in a park nor even on the downs, but right across Narnia, in spring, down solemn avenues of beech and across sunny glades of oak, through wild orchards of snow-white cherry trees, past roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns, up windy slopes alight with gorse bushes, and across the shoulders of heathery mountains and along giddy ridges and down, down, down again into wild valleys and out into acres of blue flowers.

But she didn’t come toward the door. Her footsteps sounded like she went to the dresser, then back to the bed. “Get your damned

Most of the color had fallen from the trees already, but I loved this time of year when the golden trees – the beeches mostly – held their leaves the longest. On a day like today, when the sun was bright, the mountains looked decorated with lights.

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters’ huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his forefoot raised and then go on carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Nature, Dr Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia discovered communication networks in stands of Douglas firs, which she dubbed the ‘Wood Wide Web’, suggesting the connectivity of trees. This research has been popularized by German naturalist Peter Wohlleben in his bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. He describes how oaks and beeches share information using microscopic fungal filaments, comparing these to fibre-optic Internet cables. ‘One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these “hyphae”. Over centuries a single fungus can cover many square kilometres and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping them exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers.

On these Andean mountains the southern beech has views over hundreds of kilometres of glaciated wilderness, only marginally more hospitable than Antarctica.

Distant parts of the same continent can also be connected, isolated and then connected again. Asia and Europe form a single landmass, Eurasia, but the oak trees and beech trees that grow in eastern Asia and in Europe are not the same as one another. A single species of beech tree forms cathedral-like forests carpeted in golden autumnal leaves in Europe, but different beech species grow in China and elsewhere in eastern Asia, some with trunks that soar towards the canopy, while others branch close to the ground and jostle for space with bamboo thickets on mountain slopes. The climate of central Asia is too harsh, and these trees survive best in the more moderate oceanic regions that exist towards each end of the Eurasian landmass. Isolated, they have become separate species. European oaks also differ from those in eastern Asia, as though the two regions were giant islands separated by the frigid aridity of the continent’s centre. North American beeches and oaks differ again from those in Europe and Asia. Perhaps 55 million years ago, a new kind of tree evolved: the first oak. It originated, spread, colonized different continents, evolved into different species in different regions and climates, and at least some of them came back together again; acting like a giant, slow-acting global archipelago.

Later, when I was in the Argentine, I used to tell myself that I could not die until I had seen another month of May, here in the mountains. The grass grows knee-high in the meadows and down the centre of the roads between the wheel ruts. If you are with a friend, you walk down the road with the grass between you. In the forest the late beech leaves come out, the greenest leaves in the world. The cows are let out of the stable for the first time. They leap, kick with their hind legs, turn in circles, jump like goats. The month itself is like a homecoming.