The Weeping Beech of Helfenberg Park
Of the two weeping beeches this park was protected for, one now lies on the grass. Storm Niklas pulled the larger and more imposing of the pair out of the ground on 31 March 2015. Dresden left the fallen tree where it fell, as habitat for wildlife, and planted a young one into its root zone. The survivor is the one to walk to, and it has had the harder life. In 1985 a hole in its trunk, a metre and a half up, was filled with concrete, and it has since lost a large limb. The pair were described as about 20 metres tall with crowns some 25 metres across, the biggest and gnarliest weeping beeches in the area. Measurements disagree: the city's green-space office lists 3.90 and 4.35 metres round, while baumkunde.de taped this one at 4.70 metres in 2018. Look low on the trunk for the bulge where it was grafted onto an ordinary beech, which proves a gardener made it rather than nature. Some say 300 years. More likely it went in when James Ogilvy, 7th Earl of Findlater, had the park remodelled in the English style between 1806 and 1811; a city publication of 2008 put the beeches at about 180 years. Either way it has outlived the earl, the secretary who inherited his estate, and its own twin. The district council protected both trees on 23 January 1958.
beech mast, small triangular nuts in bristly husks
late October, when the hanging curtain of leaves turns gold and copper
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Park of Schloss Helfenberg, south of the manor house, Am Helfenberger Park, Dresden-HelfenbergYou can recognise it by the concrete filling a hole in the trunk at about 1.5 metres, and by the fallen trunk of its twin, uprooted in 2015, left lying in the grass. It stands in the park south of the Helfenberg manor house.
Free. The park south of the manor house is crossed by the Elbhangwanderweg, a public walking route.
About 9 km east of the Altstadt. Bus 98B (Borsberg to Niederpoyritz via Schönfeld) is the only public transport in Helfenberg; we have not timed the walk from its stop.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
