The Hornbeam of Grondalsparken

This is the least effort any big tree in Copenhagen asks of you: about a hundred metres from the platform at Grondal station, east of the path, and you are standing under it. The Danish Tree Register logged its position in November 2019 and records it as living and healthy. The number needs reading carefully. The register gives 4.16 metres round, and its own field notes say the tree has four or five stems, so that figure is a tape run around a clump rather than around a trunk. This is not a thick-trunked hornbeam. It is a wide one, 16.5 metres tall, a Carpinus betulus left to rise as a group of stems from a single base rather than trained to one, which is the form a hornbeam takes when nobody interferes with it. Grondalsparken is a strip of green laid along the railway between Damhussoen and Borups Alle and built as a park between 1930 and 1939. It was never a grand garden and this was never a specimen tree, which is part of the appeal: a hornbeam of this width in a commuter park, three minutes from a train, with the suburb going about its business around it. Nothing records when it went in, and no source outside the register mentions it at all. If you know its age, tell us.