In his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats wrote of a ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ singing of summer in ‘some melodious plot of beechen green’. The beechen green has now become beechen gold and brown, but I can still imagine Dryads singing of the beauty of mighty Beech trees, in all their autumnal finery, and even performing paeans in praise of their statuesque forms once those golden leaves have fallen.