Viki: This week on the Local Food Report, grieving the beech trees of Provincetown’s beech forest—and the nuts they’ve long provided.
In 2022, naturalist and artist Grace Emmett of Brewster began documenting the arrival of an insect that causes something called beech leaf disease.
G: It is a parasitic roundworm or a nematode that lives inside of the leaf tissue of the beech tree specifically. And it just feeds on the beach buds first before they open and then continues feeding on them after the leaves have emerged, and it basically hurts the tree's ability to photosynthesize.
Over time, the trees affected starve and die. While not yet definitive, scientists believe that the disease is caused by a nematode that co-evolved with Asian beech trees, which are host to it but still healthy. The nematode was introduced to North America sometime before 2012 and then the disease started spreading rapidly.
G: Beech leaf disease first came to Beech Forest in Provincetown in 2022, that’s when it was confirmed, and now we're at the point where a lot of beech trees here, have little foliage at all, which is really hurting their ability to photosynthesize.
E: Is that a beech tree suffering?
G: Oh yeah, this one right here. Yeah, you can kind of see. The leaves are really dark. They're kind of crumpled up.
Sometimes the leaves affected look striped or bubbly and if you spend time in the woods where there are American beech trees, you’ve probably seen them. The disease affects many beech species, but seems to affect the American beech worst of all. And because American beech trees produce edible nuts—something I learned just a few years ago—their loss has big ramifications for the forest food web.
G: So the beech nuts are found in these like really spiky looking husks that kind of look like a carnivorous plant. And then you peel that away and there's like an outer shell. And then you have to peel that away and that's where the actual like edible nut meat is found.
To me the husks look similar to chestnut husks but smaller and the nuts are triangular, about the size of a pine nut. American beech nuts are good—I’ve eaten some as a trail snack—and they’re higher in protein than many other forest nuts, which makes them important as food for a long list of species.
G: We have jays and squirrels and a lot of other mammals, turkeys and black bears also rely on beech crops, and then also there are some certain kinds of mushrooms that have mycorrhizal relationships with beech trees, so for example you can find black trumpets here at Beech Forest, I have found them and foraged them here and those are really a delicious edible mushroom.
Many of these game and mushroom species Grace mentioned have relationships with other trees, so they won’t necessarily disappear. But the number of tree species being stressed and in some cases wiped out by the rapid climate change we’re causing keeps growing—and it’s scary for the food web as a whole.
Soon after beech leaf diseases began spreading, foresters started debating whether or not to cut out sick beech trees in order to make way for more resilient forest species, and around the same time, Grace decided to do something different—to commit to bearing witness, and to start a project documenting the changes in the forest she was seeing.
G: You know it started out sort of being very focused on seeing what we could do to help beech trees and I still have such a soft place for them in my heart, but also a lot of what the project turned into was like learning how to grieve the reality of the world that we're in and being able to make these hard choices in order to sustain our forest systems for the future.
For CAI’s Local Food Report, I’m Elspeth Hay.
Viki: Grace Emmett has self-published a book on her project titled Solstice Tree: A Story of a Forest in Times of Darkness and Light. You can find a link to learn more about this and about beech leaf disease on our website, at cape and islands dot org. This Local Food Report was edited by me, Viki Merrick, and produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole. Thanks for listening.
If you want to learn more about Grace Emmett's upcoming event Oct. 9 discussing beech leaf disease and her new book: https://www.massaudubon.org/programs/wellfleet-bay/98639-author-walk-and-talk-solstice-tree-by-grace-emmet
- If you want to learn more about beech leaf disease: https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/sustain/beech-leaf-disease-emerging-forest-threat-eastern-us
