The Fern-leaved Beech of the Amalienburg

No fern-leaved beech anywhere is much more than two centuries old, because the tree did not exist before about 1804. It is a cultivated form of the ordinary European beech whose leaves are cut into narrow ribbons, and it cannot be relied on to come true from seed, so every one of them has been grafted or struck from cuttings taken off another. That gives this specimen an unusually hard ceiling on its age, which is useful in a park where almost nothing else has a date. It stands alone at a fork in the path about 50 metres south of the Amalienburg, the rococo hunting lodge Francois de Cuvillies built in the 1730s, with a small metal plate on the trunk marking it as a natural monument. Munich's ordinance calls it a mighty and rare solitary specimen in a good position, and a German tree-recorders' database measured it in 2019 at 2.95 metres around and 25 metres tall, estimating roughly 180 years and recording its condition as vital. Look closely at the foliage and the trick of the tree becomes clear: most of the leaves are shredded to threads, but a branch here and there reverts and throws out ordinary broad beech leaves instead.