Beech v Hornbeam

Hello!

I have a long hedge which starts about a foot from the ground (suggesting the wild bunnies eat the bottom of it!!) which is either beech or hornbeam, I can't quite work out which. I know bunnies can eat beech but I don't know about hornbeam. Can they? If so, it saves me further trouble trying to work out which it is :lol:

:wave: I too have a long beech hedge, mine is definitely beech as we planted it ourselves :thumb: it's well established now. The part in the garden where the dogs are hasn't got any growth any closer to the ground than a foot or so and there aren't any wildies about, well there are but I've never seen any on our land, as I don't think they would come in due to the dogs. The beech hedge extends into our wood where our goats are, and we've had to fence them away from the hedge because they ate all the leaves that they could reach :shock::lol: I'm hoping it will grow back next year.

I've found beech leaves on some rabbit safe lists, and there's a pic here http://www.medirabbit.com/EN/GI_diseases/Food/Branch/Branch_en.htm
I can't find any reference to hornbeam being rabbit safe.

Do you have a picture of the leaves?

I can't tell the difference. And apologies if this post appears several times, there is a fault on our phone line which won't be repaired until next week and the connection is constantly dropping out, so I can't see if this has posted or not!

99% sure that's hornbeam. Does it have catkins? Or ridges in the trunk? If so it's definitely hornbeam. It might be hard getting a photo of the trunk though and there won't be catkins again til the spring.