Question on height for hclust function

I've run a cluster analysis with Jaccard distance and Ward's  
method.  The
clustering height (located on the left of the dendrogram) is not  
scaled to
the distance function because the height values range from 0 to 3.5 in
increments of 0.5.  In Oksanen's Vegan tutorial, the examples of the  
cluster
dendrograms show height values that appear to be the Bray distance  
values
(with various linkage methods) because the height values are less  
than 1.
I'm not sure what my height values reflect.  Is the clustering height
associated with Wards?  Can the the height values be rescaled to the  
Jaccard
values?

The height values at the vertical axis depend on the clustering  
method: they are the fusion levels your particular method uses. For  
single linkage these are the shortest distances between clusters, for  
complete linkage they are the maximum distances among clusters  
(cluster diameters after fusion) etc. For Ward's method they are the  
values of Ward's criterion. Now you only need to check how Ward's  
criterion is defined...

Bray and Jaccard are in similar range, and the choice between these  
indices has a negligible effect on the scales. The choice of  
clustering method has a huge impact.

cheers, Jari Oksanen