The Beets Beech of the Burcht

This tree is named after a student who wrote one of the Netherlands' best-loved books while it was still young. Nicolaas Beets studied theology in Leiden through the 1830s and, in 1839, the same year this copper beech was planted on the slope of the city's medieval fortress mound, published Camera Obscura under the pseudonym Hildebrand, a collection still assigned in Dutch schools today. Beets spent much of his student life around the Burcht, an 11th-century shell keep the municipality bought in 1651 and turned into a public park, and in 1989 the city formally named the tree in his honour, unveiling a bench beside it the same day. At 4.72 metres in circumference it is the thickest tree on the mound, one of a handful of veterans that survived the winter of 1945, when nearly every other tree in Leiden was felled for fuel during the Hunger Winter but the Burcht's older specimens were deliberately spared. That survival is now in question again, from a different direction: a root-rot fungus has been quietly turning the tree's root system to pulp, and as of the most recent inspection the municipality was investigating whether anything could extend its life rather than simply waiting for it to fall.