The Beech of Holmens Kirkegard

The surveyor from the Danish Tree Register reached for an animal to describe this trunk: almost an elephant's foot, half a metre up. The beech flares out at the base into heavy root buttresses before it rises as a single clean stem, 5.40 metres round and 19.5 metres tall, and it was logged living and healthy in December 2018. It stands on ground consecrated in 1666. Holmens Kirkegard is the burial ground of the Danish navy and the oldest cemetery in Copenhagen still in use, known also as Skovkirkegarden, the forest cemetery, and as Badsmandskirkegarden after the seamen. It is a working burial ground that anyone may walk in during daylight, and it should be visited as one. Nobody has dated the beech itself, and no source outside the register describes it. What can be said is that a beech this size on cemetery ground has had the two things a city tree almost never gets: no one digging near its roots, and no one in a hurry. Come in late autumn. European beech turns copper and russet and holds the colour for weeks, and a crown this wide over gravestones under a grey Copenhagen sky is the whole argument for the walk out here.