The Fern-Leaved Beech of Karl-Tauchnitz-Strasse

A fern-leaved beech carries leaves so deeply cut and narrow they barely register as beech foliage at all, a naturally occurring form of the common European beech that nurseries have propagated by grafting since the eighteenth century rather than a separate species. Leipzig protects this one under the same 1996 resolution that covers six other trees on this page, with a protected root zone 25 metres across, the largest of the three the city's own list records in detail. It stands about a kilometre east of the Karl-Heine-Strasse cluster, on its own rather than part of a run of protected trees, on a residential street near Leipzig's inner ring. No age or girth survives in what we could find, only the fact and date of its protection. The cut-leaf form was already being grafted and sold by German nurseries in the eighteen hundreds as an ornamental novelty, prized for a silhouette lighter and more open than an ordinary beech's dense dome. If you know more about this tree's history, tell us.