Beech trees have that wonderfully rich, golden brown colour as they fade and fall to create a warm, rustling carpet on the ground.
When I was a child my mother and her friends used to pick sprays of beech in Epping Forest as indoor decorations and paint them with glycerin to give them shine and stop them falling. Does anyone still do that?
The flora under beech, because of their heavy shade and thick leaf carpet, is rather limited, but there are sometimes interesting fungi and some of our rarer orchids, though I don't think there are any of these in Brede High Woods.
