The Pacifier Tree

Every November this hornbeam gets harvested. Since 2004 parents in Frederiksberg have brought toddlers here to tie up the pacifier they have agreed to give up, and once a year the whole crop comes down so the tree can start again. Danish dendrologists list it on their national register under the name everyone else uses: Suttetræet, the pacifier tree. That register entry is unusual for what it leaves out. Every other tree recorded in Frederiksberg Have carries a height, a girth, often a planting year. This one carries none of them. Nobody has measured it and nobody has dated it, so read any age attached to this tree as a guess rather than a measurement. It is a mature garden hornbeam. That is the whole of what is known. Which is rather the point. Carpinus betulus is the workhorse of formal European gardens, planted by the thousand for its density and its patience under the shears, and Frederiksberg Have has been royal ground since about 1700 and a romantic landscape park since its rebuilding between 1798 and 1804. The garden's history is documented down to the decade. The tree's is not. What it has instead is twenty-two years of small plastic objects and a steady supply of three-year-olds making a decision. Come in autumn if you want to see it fully loaded. The November harvest clears it back to bare branches.