The Fern-leaved Beech of the National Gallery

The beech outside Denmark's National Gallery has the wrong leaves, and that is why somebody planted it. It stands against the museum's northeastern gable facing Oster Anlaeg, 4.37 metres round and 18 metres tall, in a garden that has been open around the clock since it was reopened in 2014 toward Oster Voldgade and Solvgade. The ticket is only for the art indoors. Fagus sylvatica 'Laciniata' is a cultivated form of the ordinary European beech. Instead of the plain oval leaf, every leaf is cut almost to the midrib into narrow ragged lobes, so the tree reads as a beech from across the lawn and as something else entirely once you are standing under it. Its trunk carries a story nobody can tell. When the Danish Tree Register surveyed it in December 2019 the recorder noted many branches springing straight from the base, and several others sawn off the trunk in a pattern he could not account for. Someone worked on this tree deliberately, and the reason has not survived with it. No source outside the register describes the tree itself, and nobody has dated it. If you know its age, tell us.