The Weeping Beech of the Ring Road

The register's own 2024 inspection ends on an unusually candid note: the tree, it says, is not doing well these days. That is close to an editorial opinion for a database this dry. The weeping beech stands with a handful of ordinary beeches on a corner where the Hoofdvaart, the canal cut straight through the drained lake to the old pumping station, meets the ring road that now circles Hoofddorp. The register's own guess is that before the ring road existed, this corner might have been a small park; if so, the road took most of it, and what is left reads as a traffic island with trees on it rather than the parkland setting the tree wants. Planted, the register estimates, between 1900 and 1910, it is around a century old. A weeping beech is not a natural form. Every one alive descends by graft or cutting from a single tree found wild in Germany around 1680, propagated ever since because its branches fall instead of rising, so a mature specimen makes a tent of foliage with the trunk hidden somewhere inside. Squeezed onto a traffic corner and hemmed in by road, this one has never had the room to do that properly, which may be exactly what the register means. The register is the only source. If you know this tree, tell us how it is doing now.