Photo: Sefjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
One of the two tallest trees on this page stands on a 17th century battlefield and splits into two trunks a few feet off the ground, which is why it is simply named Twin Beech.
European Beech
Almost nothing grows under a beech, and the tree is doing it deliberately. This page maps every european beech on the site, 35 so far across 23 cities.
The leaves sit in dense overlapping layers that let very little light through, which is why a beech wood feels like a room rather than a thicket, and why left alone most of northern Europe would return to beech forest within two centuries. So a beech in a city park is often the one tree that would have been there anyway, which is what Nuremberg says of its two. The ones worth crossing town for are beeches given open ground, which keep their lower limbs and bring the crown down in a skirt you have to duck under. Prague's Twin Beech reaches 45 metres on a 1620 battlefield. Haarlem's carries a crowned monogram an exiled king cut into it around 1809. Ten cities hold the thirteen mapped here, every one of them north of the Alps.
Prague
Copenhagen
This beech is registered under the name of a boat trip.
Nijmegen
Nijmegen's oldest tree does not stand on a battlefield or beside a museum.
Fifteen metres from that horse chestnut stands a beech with a trunk over four metres round, thick enough that the city's own register lists a diameter class normally reserved for trees decades olde...
The Hague
Nothing about the corner of the Van Soutelandelaan and the Van Mojalenlaan announces a two hundred year old tree.
This beech has added about a centimetre of girth a year for the last three decades, and that number is the reason anyone looked twice at it.
The copper beeches across this park are this tree in fancy dress.
A beech that grows alone is a different shape of tree from a beech that grows in a wood.
Edinburgh
Photo: Callum Black, via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The valley floor of the Hermitage of Braid holds some of the tallest trees in Edinburgh, beech and sycamore that clear 130 feet in a steep sided gorge between the Braid Hills and Blackford Hill.
Groningen
A parked lawn beside a seventeenth century church holds one of Groningen's largest stands of old beeches, roughly thirty of them by some counts, and the Dutch national monumental tree register sing...
Munich
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This beech was already old when the park around it was new.
Munich's ordinance calls this one of the mightiest beeches in the city and notes that it carries branches almost to the ground.
The school across this green space has been teaching since 1559, which makes it the oldest in Munich.
A beech that still has its lowest branches has never had a neighbour.
Cork
The national heritage tree survey rates this beech among Blarney's exceptional specimens, alongside the more famous yew and cedar, and puts it at somewhere between 150 and 200 years old, which woul...
Maastricht
Stadspark's own marked walking route names these three beeches, standing together partway along the Jeker, as the oldest trees in a park that otherwise holds more than 1,400 of them.
Haarlem
A lonely, exiled king passed the time by carving his own royal monogram into a beech tree, and two centuries later almost nothing is left to see of it.
The two men who laid out this cemetery are buried in it, and three beeches carry their name.
Four beeches grow together along the Statenbolwerk footpath near house number 26, planted in the 1850s as part of the same wave of planting that gave the walking park its villas a decade later.
York
Photo: Tim Green (CC BY 2.0)
Halfway up the trunk of this beech, at almost exactly two metres, the bark changes: rough and fissured like a pear tree's below the line, smooth and grey like an ordinary beech's above it.
Gdansk
An opera singer's wife gave her name to this park, and this beech has outgrown every owner who has held it since.
Ede
Somebody called this tree Marjan and the name went into the national register.
Enschede
This beech was on the estate before the estate was designed.
Leeuwarden
There is a small classical temple in this park, built in 1924 to hold the work of one sculptor.
It stands next to the building where Friesland keeps its memory.
Zwolle
In 1799 the mayor of Zwolle published a 34 verse poem about this garden.
The register calls these the poortbomen, the gate trees, which is a job description rather than a species.
Aarhus
Somebody looked at this beech and saw a pig.
Nuremberg
Almost nothing grows under a beech, and the tree is doing that on purpose.
Two trees in this park would be here without anyone's help, and both of them are beeches.
Oss
This beech grows in the churchyard of Sint-Lambertuskerk in Haren, another of the small villages gathered into the municipality of Oss, banded by the national register to a planting around 1890, ro...
Portland
Seven metres round and twenty six metres tall, at the end of a residential street in Parkrose Heights, on a strip of unimproved public right of way that never became road.
Roosendaal
This beech stands behind Restaurant Vrouwenhof, banded by the national register to a planting around 1840, roughly 190 years old.
Strasbourg
Strasbourg's oldest park is full of beeches and the register singles out one of them: more than four metres around the trunk, with a crown the city calls exceptionally well developed.
Trento
Four and a half metres of trunk, and nothing else growing within reach of its branches.
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