The Weeping Beech of the Hortus

An Englishman gave this tree its first paper trail. George Loddiges, a London nurseryman whose own family ran one of Europe's great commercial gardens, documented it in 1836, and the Hortus dates the tree itself to around 1840, making it a weeping beech, a cultivar with heavy main branches held almost horizontal and side branches that trail down to the ground, grafted onto ordinary beech rootstock since the weeping form does not come true from seed. It grows directly beside the garden's pond next to an equally old fernleaf beech, the two forming one of the Hortus's most photographed corners, dense green tents a visitor can walk directly beneath rather than merely past. Age has not been kind to the original tree lately; its condition has been declining for some years, enough that the Hortus planted a younger weeping beech beside it in 1982, a gift after the sapling appeared at Amsterdam's Floriade garden show that year, deliberately positioned as an eventual successor rather than a separate attraction. Nothing here pretends the older tree will stand forever. It has already outlived the nurseryman who first wrote it down by more than a century, and for now it is still the one worth walking to.