The Weeping Beech of the Molenstraat Cemetery

Almost everything planted at this cemetery weeps. A dendrological survey of the ground lists, besides this beech, a weeping elm, weeping poplars, a weeping ash, a weeping acacia, a weeping lime and cypresses. That is not an accident of taste. Nineteenth century burial grounds used pendulous forms deliberately, and a Dutch cemetery of the 1880s was working from the same nursery catalogues as everywhere else in Europe. Somebody ordered the mood along with the trees. The cemetery was founded in 1880 as an expansion of an older Catholic burial ground on the Molenstraat, laid out with a central path and a Calvary mount, and it is a general public cemetery today. The beech is banded 1900 to 1910, so it arrived a generation after the ground was consecrated, into a plan that already had its shape. Nobody has dated it more precisely than that decade. A weeping beech is one tree pretending to be a room. The branches arch out and then fall vertically to the ground, and a mature one encloses a space underneath that you can walk into. This one has had a century to build it. The register marks it as not visible from the path, which in a cemetery full of weeping trees is a specific problem rather than a general one. Go by the leaf.