Beuk Marjan

Somebody called this tree Marjan and the name went into the national register. That is a small thing and it is not nothing. Almost every entry in that register is a species and an address. A handful carry a name, and a name means a person: somebody local knew this beech well enough to call it something, used the name often enough that other people used it too, and it eventually turned up on an official form. The tree itself is a beech of about two hundred years in the Edese bos, north of the N224, and its age is the interesting part in this landscape. Two hundred years ago much of the Veluwe was open drifting sand, and the woods around Ede are largely a nineteenth and twentieth century creation, planted to fix the ground and grow timber. A beech from the 1820s is from the very beginning of that effort. Beech is also the wrong tree for this soil on paper. It wants moisture and does badly on dry sand, so a big old one out here has found itself a better pocket of ground than its neighbours. Bring your hand. That bark is the smoothest thing in the wood.