Collected Beech Branches Have Many Uses

In early March I went beech collecting. No, not beach collecting but beech collecting. Many years ago when I was working with plantsman Hitch Lyman he called me up and said, “Have you cut your beech branches yet?” I had no clue what he was talking about, but his short lecture and demonstration that followed was a horticultural gem.

Both cultivated and wild beech trees have a wonderful stem and twig structure that lends their properly cut pieces to being perfect garden supports. Twigs and stems of two to five feet long can have from five to 15 lateral shoots that reach out a foot or more from the center. This fan type of structure and form makes the cut branches perfect for supporting leggy, leaning and untamed garden plants for a more refined and structured form in the garden.

The twigs are great for use with clematis, dahlias, lilies and just about any perennial or annual that has a tendency to lean toward the sun or reach out of its confines for one reason or another. The beech twigs, when cut late in the winter before they leaf out, remain pliable and bendable for months. The cut wood is usually the thickness of a pencil, though you can find pieces that are thinner and thicker and a collection of varied sizes can come in handy.

I’ve used these branches in a large bed of Echinacea (coneflower) that tends to flop out of its bed and onto the lawn. Beech twigs carefully placed around the perimeter create a latticework of support that blends into the coneflower stems, and if I didn’t point out the twigs and branches you’d never notice them.

It may not be too late to go out and do some collecting if you know where beeches are growing in the woods or on your property. One key to finding them, aside from their characteristic structure, is the fact that they retain their brown leaves right through the winter. Don’t go overboard. Cut a few branches from each tree and look for branches that have numerous side shoots. Don’t trim the pruned branches, though, as you’ll want to trim and shape the supports as you need them. Wild beeches, copper beeches and even weeping beeches provide good material to work with.

Pile or store the branches in a shaded spot where they’ll remain out of the sun and they’ll silently wait for use. When you need a piece, you simply cut it to size, trim as needed and remember to leave the end long, because you will be pushing it six to eight inches into the ground. Cutting the ends at a 45-degree angle makes it easy to slip them into the soil or sod.

With just a little practice, you’ll learn how to bend and shape the twigs and prune them perfectly. They really do blend in well and are among the best staking materials I’ve found—renewable, locally grown and organic.

So what can we expect to see as damage from the winter’s cold? Salt damage, freeze damage (no snow cover), marginally-hardy plant damage, damage to roots and bulbs not planted deep enough and rose damage. I remember years ago being told by local gardeners that they usually found that white hybrid roses seemed more susceptible to the cold than others. Not sure if this is true, but if you do notice substantial dieback on grafted roses be very careful with your spring pruning.

If there has been a great deal of cane dieback and you prune too heavily you’ll end up with nothing but ugly small white flowers. Also watch for complete graft dieback but lots of shoots coming from below the graft. Again, this would be the curse of the rootstock—lots of ugly white flowers. When this happens the rose is pretty much a loss.

I think the most sensible advice is: don’t be in a hurry. Some damage may not even appear until late spring and early summer when plants, especially new trees and shrubs, are under stress from heat and lack of water and the stress from a brutal winter begins to reveal itself.

On the positive side, though, a very cold winter serves to reduce certain insect populations. We should expect to see a reduction in the scale problem on privets and also a reduction of scale and woolly adelgid in hemlocks. Even aphids and some beetles may be affected, but we won’t know until the early populations emerge—or don’t. Unfortunately, some of our beneficial insects may have also been deep frozen, with their numbers reduced. In the end, Mother Nature is the great balancer. We’re the ones that usually screw things up.

As our garden world began to thaw toward the end of February, the animal world quickly came back to life. You may have noticed signs of this in your garden beds and in your lawn. The first clue wasn’t visual but olfactory … the unmistakable scent of a skunk. I was driving to work early one morning when the scent hit me like a brick wall. It meant that the skunks had had enough and were out looking for a meal. Then, a few days later, I noticed a very large opossum waddling through the apple orchard. It stopped at the base of each tree and dug a bit at that small circumference of soil that had thawed in the sun. Both the skunk and the possum were foraging for any bug or unsuspecting insect, grub or larvae that they could find. In doing so it’s not uncommon for them to dig in the lawn as well where they sense a morsel may be hidden.

And as soon as the topsoil thawed or snow melted there was evidence of moles and voles. Not just tunneling in their search for grubs and worms, but in some spots throwing up mounds of earth where they began to dig their spring nurseries. And then there was the groundhog. I spied the first one in the last week of February waddling along the side of Sunrise Highway near Hampton Bays. In this case, Phil or Philomena was in search of either a mate or some delicious herbaceous delicacy.

The skunks and opossums do little damage, and are for the most part beneficial. The groundhogs, moles and voles … well not exactly our best friends or easy catches, though we certainly spend lots of time and money trying. Keep in mind though that a mole, vole or groundhog caught in April means several more that you won’t have to catch in July.

And if your lawn guy or landscaper hasn’t hit you up yet for the 2014 fertilizer, insecticide and weed control program for your lawn, hold them off as long as you can. Most of these guys like to get their stuff down as early as possible in the spring because they want that lawn growing (to be cut) and they want to get their herbicides down (“Oh, it’s been a wet summer; we need to apply them again”). But wait. Just because they’re in a hurry doesn’t mean your lawn is. The lawn can actually wait until May to be fed, and the weeds don’t need to be tended to until after that. Unfortunately, the lawn guys buy fertilizers with herbicides in them so they can do everything at once. Good for them and their cash flow, but not necessarily for your lawn.

Keep growing.