The big orange bungalow was nice, but it was the beech tree that cast a spell. On the day we toured the house, thousands of hard, spiny burrs enclosing beech nuts blanketed the side yard. That, we were told, was a mast year, the beech seeding in exceptional quantities — which, of course, I took as a sign. Mostly, I admire its generosity, its wordless willingness to care for what is not in any immediate sense its own. He tells us that it can kill a big tree like ours in less than 10 years.

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Locations: North America