The Lodewijk Napoleon Beech

A lonely, exiled king passed the time by carving his own royal monogram into a beech tree, and two centuries later almost nothing is left to see of it. Lodewijk Napoleon, installed by his brother as the first King of Holland in 1806, spent time at the government estate now known as Paviljoen Welgelegen, a short walk from this stretch of the Haarlemmerhout, and sometime between 1808 and 1810 carved a crowned letter R into the beech's bark, R for Roi, the French word for king. He was not a popular monarch by Dutch standards, remembered mostly for resisting his brother's harsher demands on the Dutch economy before Napoleon deposed him outright in 1810 and annexed the kingdom directly into France. The carving outlasted the reign by two centuries, slowly closing over as the tree's bark grew and healed around the old wound, the way any scar eventually fades on a tree that keeps living. By 2025, arborists inspecting it reported there was virtually nothing left to make out, the crown and the letter both swallowed by growth. The beech stands in the Haarlemmerhout, the oldest public park in the Netherlands, itself burned to nothing during the 1572-73 Spanish siege of Haarlem and replanted from 1584, meaning this specific tree is a second or third generation of forest on ground that has been fought over more than once.