The Weeping Beech of the Palmengarten

This beech has been quietly making more of itself. Where its drooping branches reached the ground they took root, and what began as one tree is now a hall of leaves you can walk into. From outside it reads as a single heavy green dome. From underneath it is a room, held up by the parent trunk and by branch tips that grew themselves legs. Frankfurt's own tree cadastre dates the planting to 1845. It stands just over four metres round and about 16 metres tall, and a tree surveyor who measured it in June 2023 recorded it as vital with some branch breakage, which is what happens to a weeping beech carrying that much weight sideways. The city put it on its register of natural monuments in 2025. Weeping beeches are not a wild form. Every one is propagated from a mutant that hangs instead of reaches, so a garden that planted one in 1845 was buying a curiosity, and this is what a curiosity looks like after 180 years of being left alone. It is in the western part of the Palmengarten by the Gesellschaftshaus, a short walk from the Palmenhaus and from the copper beech that is three decades older again. The Palmengarten charges admission, so this is the one tree in Frankfurt on this list you pay to stand under. Or inside, which is the better way to do it.