American Beech Fagus grandifolia
American Beech is a perennial tree native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 80 ft and blooms Apr in full sun, with brown fruit. A keystone plant for native insects and the food web.
More about this plant
Fagus grandifolia, the American beech or North American beech, is a species of tree growing to 16–35 meters tall. It is one of two beech species native to North America, the other occurring in Mexico. It flourished over most of the continent prior to the last ice age, but is now limited to the east. The tree is shade tolerant and found in forests in the final stage of succession. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.1–7.2
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- High
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 80 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 35 ft wide wild/forest-grown — open-grown specimens spread wider
- Spacing
- 7–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~127 caterpillar species
Fagus supports ~127 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Fagus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting American Beech :
Wildlife & visitors 5 birds · 4 nectaring
Open records of who else uses American Beech — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 5 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
4 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 480 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded American Beech, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Fagus →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (39) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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