The Twin Beeches of the Goverts Gasthuis

These two beeches were dated by a photograph. In a picture of the almshouse taken in 1904 they are saplings, thin enough to be easy to miss. That photograph is most of the evidence for their age, and the national register says so plainly. It reads the picture, puts the planting somewhere between 1900 and 1910, and leaves the question there. It also notes what the image makes obvious: the two were set deliberately in mirror image, one on each side of the building, the way an institution used to announce itself. The institution is far older than either the trees or the house they stand against. The Marcelis Goverts Gasthuis was founded in 1658 by Marcelis Goverts and Mayke Marcus for Leeuwarden's Mennonite congregation, and it moved to the Noordersingel in 1877 into a Neo-Renaissance building by the architect H.R. Stoett. The beeches came a generation after that. The most dangerous thing to happen to them since went on underground. In 1994 sewer works were dug close by, the kind of job that quietly kills a mature tree by taking out its roots, and both came through it. Inspected in 2017, both were in good leaf with nothing wrong at the base of the trunk. Neither trunk has been measured, and the register is the only source that mentions the trees at all. They stand directly across the Noordersingel from the Prinsentuin, which puts them on the same short walk.