Trees by the library

Today on lunch hour, I observed two types of trees by the library.  All were small.  Sometimes one doesn't know whether trees are small because they are young, or because it is their nature -- maybe they are shrubs, or a type of tree that just doesn't get much bigger. 

The trees along the side of the library had peeling white bark, so I figured they were birch.  Well, it wasn't a snow-white color, like the trees I noticed the other day.  It was more red or yellow or rust.  The trees were the same shape as the birches I observed the other day -- one sapling-size twig, and lots of twig-size branches.  While much of the trunk bark was whitish, the branches and some of the trunk were darker, in kind of a red-gray way. 

Some were all dark, without the white:

At first I had thought the outer bark was whitish, and the darker color was where all the white had peeled away.  But when I looked closer, it seemed the darker color was the outer bark, and the white was inside, where it had peeled back.

The two trees behind the library were short and stubby.  Shorter than the birches, but with wider, fuller branching.  I thought they might be beeches I had heard that the other trees besides oaks that have brown leaves in winter are beeches.  The twigs forked at the end, with end buds at the ends of each fork.  The buds were puffy, then pointed, like in Russian architecture.

I looked for side buds but did not see any. The bark was mostly gray, but on one of the trees, there was a patch on the trunk that had peeled off to reveal reddish bark below.

When I got home and checked my book, naturally what I saw did not match anything in the book.  There was a bush called hobblebush with the twigs that fork at the end, but the hobblebush buds were a different shape, and I read that hobblebush branches reach out more horizontally.  However this picture that I took of the same tree or bush looks a little more like the pictures of hobblebush that I found on the internet: