The Weeping Beech of Situlistraße

By the city's own reckoning this is the largest weeping beech standing in Munich. The 2021 natural monument ordinance says so in its reason for protection, hedged with derzeit, currently, which is the honest way to make a superlative about something alive. Every weeping beech is a graft. Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula' does not come true from seed, so each one is a cutting from the same weeping line joined onto the roots of an ordinary green beech, and on older specimens the union often still shows as a change in the bark near the ground. Above it the tree does what no wild beech does. The limbs arch outward and then fall, layer over layer, until the branch tips reach the ground and the whole crown closes into a room. Getting inside and standing at the trunk is the point of the species, and the reason gardeners have kept grafting it since the early nineteenth century. It grows in the grounds at Situlistraße 73-75 in Freimann, about 70 metres from a copper beech the same ordinance protects on its own account, so the two are one short walk rather than two errands. No age is recorded. The ordinance names reasons and never dates, so the city has written down that this is the biggest of its kind here without recording a single number about it.