Beech seedlings...

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plymouthgarden SE Mass, MA(Zone 6b) May 24, 2006

Hi - I've posted pics of my beloved beeches before here, and have a question. We have seedlings growing in our yard - some are small (less then a foot tall), and a few are 4' tall. Some leaf out as light green leaves, others leaf out as red leaves. All our BIG beeches leaf out in various shades of red/orange or copper (except the cutleaf one which is of course green). My question - are these baby beeches from the trees in our yard? Are seedlings often different from the mom? Also, we've never found a seedling of the cutleaf beech - so they do not self-seed or does that leaf shape come with age?

We have a few seedlings (the 4' ones), which we've isolated in the landscape and are tending to - or just watching grow actually - we don't have to do much! Would love to have a baby of the big cutleaf though....

Just wondering....

Kara

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Resin Northumberland, United Kingdom(Zone 9a) May 24, 2006

Yes, they are all likely to be seedlings from your own trees, though the pollen that pollinated them might have blown in from a fair distance. But beech seeds don't travel very far, not more than a jay's flight from the parent tree.

There's obviously been a copper beech somewhere in the ancestry of your beeches. They have a relatively high heritability, with copper-foliaged trees producing a fairly high percentage of copper-foliage offspring. Cutleaf beeches don't; their heritability is much lower - seedlings from a cut-leaf are 99.9% normal beeches: sow a thousand seeds, and you might get a cut-leaf seedling.

Resin

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