The Fern-leaved Beech

The old trees of the Englischer Garten did not survive by luck. The park has been tended by the Bavarian palace administration for more than two hundred years and is protected as a garden monument and a landscape conservation area, which is what kept the growing city from building on it. This beech is on the register for a different reason again: it barely exists anywhere else in Munich. The fern-leaved beech is a naturally occurring form of the common European beech in which the leaves grow narrow, deeply cut and lace-like instead of the usual broad oval, a genetic quirk that occasionally turns up in beech forests and gets propagated deliberately when someone notices it. Munich's specimen, standing west of the administrative building near the Chinese Tower on the bank of the Schwabinger Bach stream, has a trunk 3.67 metres around and is registered by the city specifically for how rare the form is within Munich rather than for size or documented age, unlike most of the natural monuments on this list. From a distance in full leaf it can look almost feathery compared to an ordinary beech standing nearby, a small, deliberate anomaly kept alive in one of the park's quieter corners rather than along its main paths.