The Schlossberg Beech

This beech was made a protected natural monument on 17 November 1939, ten weeks into the war, which is a curious moment to be filing paperwork about a tree. The register entry reads simply Rotbuche Schlossberg, red beech on the castle hill, and it has carried that one line ever since without acquiring a further sentence of description. That is the honest problem with this one. The state register confirms the designation, the name and the coordinate, and then stops: no age, no girth, not a word of text, its own file noting that no document exists for the object. A separate piece on beeches in the state's castle gardens describes fourteen mature red beeches at the Scheffelterrasse, on the edge of this same garden, which tells you old beeches genuinely grow here but does not pick out the designated one. So we can send you to the right corner of the Schlossgarten and not to the exact trunk. It is worth the walk anyway, because the setting does the work. The Schlossgarten is the terraced garden below Heidelberg Castle, free and open in daylight, and a mature European beech there is standing in ground that has been laid out, ruined and replanted more than once since the castle above it was still a palace. Grey trunk, smooth bark, a canopy that keeps the ground beneath it bare. If you can tell which beech carries the designation, we would like to know.