The Weeping Beech of the Diepenveenseweg Cemetery

A weeping beech in a nineteenth century cemetery is not a coincidence, it is a convention. The form was fashionable exactly when these grounds were laid out, and the reading was obvious enough that nobody had to explain it: a tree whose branches fall to the ground rather than reaching up. Cemeteries across northern Europe filled with weeping beeches, weeping willows and weeping ashes in the same few decades, and this one, banded 1830 to 1840, is from the beginning of that. The register calls this burial ground historically and ecologically very valuable, in the old ring of the city, and it is looked after by a foundation for Deventer's old cemeteries. What makes the tree worth the walk is that a mature weeping beech is hollow. The branches arch out and hang to the grass all round, so you can push through the skirt and stand inside a green room with a trunk in the middle. Doing that in a cemetery feels like trespass and is not. One to see in leaf, so any time from May to October. In winter it is a bare cage, which is its own thing but less startling.