The leaves of buckwheat look very similar to the leaves of a beech tree. The German for beech is Buche and so buckwheat is really beechwheat. Beech trees were important to the ancient Germans. Beechwood is thick-grained and not splitty (to use woodworking terminology), so it’s easy to carve things in it, and that’s exactly what the Germans used to do. Beech, buche or bok, as it was called in Old High German, was the standard material for writing on. Even when wood was finally overtaken by the newfangled invention of parchment, the Germans kept the name, and so did the English. Bok became boc
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