The Weeping Beech of Wilhelminapark

The lowest branches of this beech touch the ground and can root back into it, so what looks like one tree is quietly capable of becoming a ring of them. That habit is what a weeping beech does when nobody stops it. The straight trunk throws its branches out and down instead of up, and where a branch tip lies against damp soil for long enough it can strike its own roots, a trick foresters call layering. Duck under the canopy at Wilhelminapark's western pond edge and you are standing inside a room the tree built for itself, walled by drooping branches on every side and lit green through the leaves. The register puts its planting in the 1890s, which makes it a First World War contemporary standing quietly in a park that also holds a Polish war memorial and a captured German tank nearby. Nobody has recorded its age more precisely than the decade it was planted, and a trunk this size does not need a precise number to be worth ducking into. Free, public park, open daily. Come in winter if you want to see the architecture. Bare, the cascading branch structure of a weeping beech reads more dramatic than in full leaf, when the canopy is one solid green mass instead of a hundred draped ribs.