The Zehrovice Beech

This beech is dying, and the village has decided not to fight it. A wood-decay fungus is working through the trunk, there is no cure, and the municipality's position as of February 2025 is non-intervention: the tree stays where it is, its death is treated as inevitable, and what is left will stand as deadwood habitat. It was still standing when that notice was written. A sapling cloned from it is already growing a few metres away. It was called the most beautiful beech in the country once, and the shape that earned it is mostly gone. The crown used to spread around 35 metres. Hurricane Herwart took much of it on 29 October 2017, and photographs from May 2020 show only half of what remains coming into leaf. The trunk is 526 centimetres round, the tree about 21 metres tall. Sources put its age between 350 and 450 years and do not agree with each other; the fungus is named differently by different sources too. So this is not a visit to a tree at its peak. It is a visit to a large old beech in its last years, standing below the road at the double bend north of the village, with its own replacement rooted beside it. Our pin marks the bend rather than the trunk, so expect to look.