The Hornbeam of Grondalsparken

The figure in the register, 4.16 metres, is not a trunk. The surveyor counted four or five stems and put the tape around the lot of them, so this is a wide multi-stemmed hornbeam rather than a thick-trunked one, which is worth saying plainly because the number flatters it otherwise. What it is instead is a big healthy hornbeam 16.5 metres tall, a hundred metres from Grøndal station, in a green corridor that follows the railway between Damhussøen and Borups Allé. Grøndalsparken was laid out between 1930 and 1939 to the design of the city gardener Fabricius-Hansen. Nothing in the record dates this tree to that work, so it is not dated here either. Several stems out of one base is the ordinary shape for Carpinus betulus. It is the classic coppice and hedging tree of northern Europe, cut for centuries for tool handles and firewood because the wood is harder than oak, and it answers cutting by coming back as a cluster rather than a trunk. Only the register carries this tree. It was recorded alive and healthy when the position was checked in November 2019, and no other source names it at all. If you know anything about its history, tell us.