Hornbeam

When I took on the role of tour guide for Babcock Ridge, I quickly realized that there were some holes in my resume that needed to be plugged... fast. Chief among them was my relative ignorance about the identity of trees. I don't understand this. I have, after all, been working in the woods for most of my life, so you would think that I'd have made myself a tree wizard, a master of identifying all species dendrological. It never happened. To be sure, I could tell an oak from a maple from a beech from a hickory, but when it came to specifics—knowing the trees from the forest—I was hopeless. Given my upcoming task, it was time to change, so, with tree guides in hand, I ventured forth. I'm actually pretty good with taxonomy, and I'm decent with the wildflowers, so in short order, I was getting adept at separating the red oaks from the white oaks, and the sugar maples from the red maples. When it came to the understory, I just plunged in and kept going. This blue beech, a.k.a. musclewood, ironwood, and, most properly, American hornbeam, was easy. There's no confusing its "ripped" trunk and bark with anything else in the woods.