This volume compares the beech forests of eastern Asia, North America and Europe. Beech forests are important in each of these three regions. No other book covers beech on this scale. The author has personally studied beech forests in each region, and his large body of data is the starting point for comparison. For such a world-wide comparison to be justified, factors that have most strongly influenced the beech forests should be known. First, use and management of beech forests are compared. They have influenced beech forests for millennia and have been very different in each region. Next, in a historical comparison spread and speciation since the early Tertiary are analysed. Today's beech forests cover a wide range of climates and soils; they occur in cool temperate regions as well as on tropical mountains. The final part compares the trees and forests themselves: growth and form of trees, species composition and populations, forest structure and forest dynamics.

In the Beech Forest ticks all the boxes for encouraging both male and female teenagers (aged about fifteen years) to read. While illustrated books for older readers usually appeal to young males, In the Beech Forest is illustrated by Den Scheer, a young woman in her teens. Ten to fifteen-year-old males would also relate to In the Beech Forest as its theme is a young man's perilous rite of passage in search of self. The youth involved is actually fearful of the monstrous creatures he faces in his computer games and must overcome this fear to become a man-a growth process which is admirably represented visually with all the irony that only a female teenage illustrator could create: not only does the boy triumph, he realises his triumph by imagining the battle between a monstrous male force and a diminutive female force which the female wins! In Real Boys Voices clinical psychologist William Pollack allows his young male clients to speak for themselves, quoting 17-year-old Tom regarding his rite of passage to manhood: ... people should realise what we go through, what we feel, what problems are important and how they can be fixed. (Pollack, W. 2000. Real Boys Voices. Scribe, Melbourne. p. 377). Every teenage boy could therefore relate to In The Beech Forest which uses both visual images and accessible print text to address these very feelings.

This handbook in two volumes synthesises our knowledge about the ecology of Central Europe’s plant cover with its 7000-yr history of human impact, covering Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Based on a thorough literature review with 5500 cited references and nearly 1000 figures and tables, the two books review in 26 chapters all major natural and man-made vegetation types with their climatic and edaphic influences, the structure and dynamics of their communities, the ecophysiology of important plant species, and key aspects of ecosystem functioning. Volume I deals with the forests and scrub vegetation and analyses the ecology of Central Europe’s tree flora, whilst Volume II is dedicated to the non-forest vegetation covering mires, grasslands, heaths, alpine habitats and urban vegetation. The consequences of over-use, pollution and recent climate change over the last century are explored and conservation issues addressed.

"A volume for a lifetime" is how The New Yorker described the first of Donald Culross Peatie's two books about American trees published in the 1950s. In this one-volume edition, modern readers are introduced to one of the best nature writers of the last century. As we read Peattie's eloquent and entertaining accounts of American trees, we catch glimpses of our country's history and past daily life that no textbook could ever illuminate so vividly. Here you'll learn about everything from how a species was discovered to the part it played in our country’s history. Pioneers often stabled an animal in the hollow heart of an old sycamore, and the whole family might live there until they could build a log cabin. The tuliptree, the tallest native hardwood, is easier to work than most softwood trees; Daniel Boone carved a sixty-foot canoe from one tree to carry his family from Kentucky into Spanish territory. In the days before the Revolution, the British and the colonists waged an undeclared war over New England's white pines, which made the best tall masts for fighting ships. It's fascinating to learn about the commercial uses of various woods -- for paper, fine furniture, fence posts, matchsticks, house framing, airplane wings, and dozens of other preplastic uses. But we cannot read this book without the occasional lump in our throats. The American elm was still alive when Peattie wrote, but as we read his account today we can see what caused its demise. Audubon's portrait of a pair of loving passenger pigeons in an American beech is considered by many to be his greatest painting. It certainly touched the poet in Donald Culross Peattie as he depicted the extinction of the passenger pigeon when the beech forest was destroyed. A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.

Provides natural history narratives and identification information for sixty different species of trees found in Pennsylvania and the northeast.