The Beeches of the Dordrechts Museum Garden

Nobody, including the register that lists them, is sure which of these three beeches is the old one. Two copper beeches and one green beech stand together by the garden gate at the Dordrechts Museum. The national tree register records a 2020 girth of 315 and 300 centimetres for the copper pair and 300 for the green one, and its own history note says one of the three would date from 1880 and the other two from 1925, then adds that nobody has yet tracked down where that claim comes from. That puts the group at somewhere between about 100 and 145 years old, an honest range rather than a tidy number. The museum's own account of its garden calls the oldest of the three, standing along the fence, a tree with a full, well-shaped crown, and notes that beeches like these can live 200 to 300 years if their shallow, sensitive roots are left undisturbed. That may be exactly why nobody has put a spade near them to settle the dating question. They share the garden with three older plane trees from the museum's founding years. Reaching them means a museum ticket.