The Weeping Beech of Weeping Beech Park

In December 1998 a tree in Flushing was given a funeral. The weeping beech that had stood here since 1847 had been declared dead by the Parks Department, and the following March a ten-foot section of its trunk was kept as a memorial. That original arrived from Belgium as a cutting, brought over by Samuel Bowne Parsons and planted in 1847. By 1966, when the city made it a landmark, it spread 85 feet, stood 65 feet tall and measured 14 feet round. This page is about what came after. The park named for it holds a grove of weeping beeches descended from the 1847 tree, and a large weeping beech now stands on the original's spot, behind the Kingsland Homestead. How it got there depends on who tells it. NY1 reported in 2022 that a cross-section of the old trunk was replanted on the same ground and a new tree grew there; the Queens Chronicle describes eight young trees around the stump as offshoots. Either way it is a descendant, and that is what we call it. Nobody has published an age or a girth for the living tree, so we give neither. If you know when it took the old one's place, tell us. The park is free. Look too for the big Cedar of Lebanon in the playground and the Golden Larch on the 37th Avenue sidewalk. Our pin marks the park rather than the trunk.