The Weeping Beech of Assistens

Every weeping beech is a graft, and on this one the join is in plain sight. About a metre up the trunk there is a visible union where a cutting of the pendulous form was fixed onto ordinary beech rootstock, and the surveyor who measured the tree in November 2019 noted that the grafted top is now putting on wood faster than the stock beneath it, so the trunk steps outward where the two meet. Look for that step before you look at the curtain. The same survey recorded something less comfortable: a large wound at the base of the trunk. The tree was logged as alive, 3.29 metres round and 15 metres tall, but it is a healthy crown standing over an open injury, which is worth knowing rather than glossing over. Weeping beech became a Danish cemetery fashion in the nineteenth century under the name sørgebøg, mourning beech, planted to hang over a grave the way a mourner leans over it. No planting date survives for this one. The 80 to 150 years on this page is worked back from the girth, not counted. It stands in section B, just right of the Kapelvej entrance, which makes it the first serious tree most visitors to Assistens Kirkegård walk straight past.