The Weeping Beech by the Pond

Go inside it. That is the point of a weeping beech and almost nobody does it. The branches of a mature one arch out and then fall straight to the ground all the way round, so what you have is a green tent perhaps fifteen metres across with a bare floor and a trunk in the middle. Children work this out immediately. Adults walk past. Weeping beech is a cultivar, not a species: a mutant form propagated by grafting, so every one is a clone of an original found in Europe in the eighteenth century. The graft union is usually visible as a swelling low on the trunk. It grows the same way a normal beech does except that it cannot hold its branches up, and left alone it will layer, meaning a branch resting on soil roots and becomes a new trunk, so an old one can slowly walk outward across a lawn. This one stands on the northeast side of the pond at Het Bouwhuis, planted between 1900 and 1910, on ground documented since 1536. Duck under the skirt on the pond side and look back out at the water through the leaves.