Botanic Gardens Hornbeam

One of the largest hornbeams in the north of Ireland may be as old as the gardens around it. The Friends of Belfast Botanic Gardens think it could date back to their founding, when the ground was bought in 1828, and Belfast City Council's 2019 Tree of the Year nomination put its planting in and around that year. Nobody has a record of the day it went in, so read that as the gardens' belief rather than a date. It would make the tree something under two hundred years old. Hornbeam is not native to Ireland, and this one has spent its life growing into a shape nobody would design. The trunk is twisted, grooved and bulged, and some branches have grown back into each other and fused, which foresters call inosculation. There is a small dispute about what it is. The nomination that put it on the Woodland Trust's Northern Ireland shortlist called it Botanic's oriental hornbeam. The Friends' own catalogue lists only the common hornbeam, Carpinus betulus, and describes this tree as one. We follow the catalogue. If you know your hornbeams, the leaves will settle it, and we would like to hear what you find. No girth or height has been published, so a tape measure is welcome too. The gardens are a free council park, a few minutes from Botanic station, and by the nominator's count it is one of only two hornbeams in them.