Old Man's Wood Beech, Bute Park

The wood this beech stands in was scrub on an Ordnance Survey plan of 1851. As late as 1824, Old Man's Wood did not exist at all. The beech on its eastern edge is now 34 metres tall and was measured at 4.58 metres round in 2023, up from 4.33 seven years earlier. Bute Park's own tree survey tries to date it from that girth and lands on two answers. If it grew on a good flood-plain site, it started around 1845. If its ground was only average, around 1768. The earlier date would make the tree older than the wood that now surrounds it; the later one would make it roughly the wood's own age. The survey does not choose between them, and neither do we. Either way, it came up on the private grounds of Cardiff Castle, on the flood plain of the Taff, and it has kept growing through everything since, including the decades in which those grounds became a public park. Its neighbours make the walk. The Blackfriars plane, Glamorgan's champion London plane, stands about a hundred metres south, and a second big plane beside it, so the three make one short stop rather than three separate trips. The tag on the trunk is a black plastic plate and hard to read, so do not count on it. Look up instead. At 34 metres it is easier to find by its crown than its label, and in late October that crown turns copper.