European Beech

150 years · Liboc, Praha 6

This beech was protected for its height, not its age.

European Quarter

The famous tree in Parc Leopold is a plane.

Ixelles / Solbosch

Of every European beech in the Brussels-Capital Region, only six are thicker than this one.

Munich's ordinance calls this one of the mightiest beeches in the city and notes that it carries branches almost to the ground.

Altstadt-Lehel

The school across this green space has been teaching since 1559, which makes it the oldest in Munich.

Ramersdorf-Perlach

A beech that still has its lowest branches has never had a neighbour.

~180 years · Tegel, Reinickendorf

For decades Berlin's tallest tree was the wrong tree.

Tiergarten

Berlin's register takes the trouble to say exactly which beech this is: Gewoehnliche Buche, Rot-Buche, the plain green common beech.

126-136 years · Wilhelminapark

This is the plain, green-leaved beech among a park that otherwise favours its copper and weeping cousins, which makes it the least conspicuous registered tree in Wilhelminapark and one of the largest.

150-160 years · Binnenstad-Noord

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...

175-185 years · Prinsentuin

There is a small classical temple in this park, built in 1924 to hold the work of one sculptor.

155-165 years · Prinsentuin

It stands next to the building where Friesland keeps its memory.

116-126 years · Noordersingel, across from the Prinsentuin

These two beeches were dated by a photograph.

190 years · Benoordenhout

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.

190 years · Leidschendam-Voorburg

The copper beeches across this park are this tree in fancy dress.

130 years · Wieden (4th district)

When a city protects a tree for its profile, it is saying something simple: this one shapes the neighbourhood.

150-300 years · Kitsilano (Dunbar Street near West 1st/2nd Avenue)

Vancouver's heritage register is mostly buildings.

150-220 years · Oliwa

An opera singer's wife gave her name to this park, and this beech has outgrown every owner who has held it since.

120-220 years · Frederiksberg

This beech is registered under the name of a boat trip.

160 years · Jekerdal

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.

275 years · Brakkenstein

Nijmegen's oldest tree does not stand on a battlefield or beside a museum.

Heijendaal

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...

150-200 years · Blarney

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...

230 years · Haarlemmerhout

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.

175-225 years · Kleverlaan

The two men who laid out this cemetery are buried in it, and three beeches carry their name.

~170 years · Statenbolwerk

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.

225-275 years · Boschwijk

In 1799 the mayor of Zwolle published a 34 verse poem about this garden.

155-165 years · Eekhout

The register calls these the poortbomen, the gate trees, which is a job description rather than a species.

130 years · Spoolde, Park 't Engelse Werk

In a park where beeches were planted in almost every decade from the 1870s to the 1930s, the national monumental tree register picked this one.

Skåde / Højbjerg

Somebody looked at this beech and saw a pig.

Bonnerue (Houffalize)

This beech has got smaller.

Cínovec, Ústí nad Labem Region

The tree standing here is not the tree the stories are about.

300 years · Gjerrild, Norddjurs municipality

Local tradition says this beech started as a mouse's winter larder.

Schlossberg / Schlossgarten

This beech was made a protected natural monument on 17 November 1939, ten weeks into the war, which is a curious moment to be filing paperwork about a tree.

130 years · Ten Vorsel estate, Bladel (roughly 16 km from Hilvarenbeek)

A forester working on its estate has said on record that its species is nothing special and its legend is made up.

Foyr (Jalhay), Province de Liège

People drove nails into this beech to get rid of their toothache.

250 years · Beverce (Malmedy), Province de Liege

Shepherds used to stop here at noon with their flocks, and the beeches they rested under are still standing, though not for much longer.

Mokřice, Krásná Hora nad Vltavou

A beech 4.10 metres round stands in open country outside Mokřice, a hamlet belonging to the small town of Krásná Hora nad Vltavou, and according to OpenStreetMap somebody has put a picnic table rig...

350-450 years · Msecke Zehrovice, Rakovnik District, Central Bohemia

This beech is dying, and the village has decided not to fight it.

Nová Ves pod Pleší, about 9km from Dobříš

Birds nest in this beech, and a fungus is eating it, and both facts are in the official record.

Kleinweidenmühle

Almost nothing grows under a beech, and the tree is doing that on purpose.

Kleinweidenmühle

Two trees in this park would be here without anyone's help, and both of them are beeches.

Gärten bei Wöhrd / Wöhrd

Eighty metres from this beech stands another one just like it, and Nuremberg's own register keeps them as two separate legal entities: Naturdenkmal Nr. 28 and Nr. 29, each with its own designation...

Gärten bei Wöhrd / Wöhrd

This beech and its neighbour eighty metres away are the two survivors of a trio.

Parkrose Heights

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.

120-150 years · Forêt de Roumare, D351 between Canteleu and Sahurs

One of the biggest beeches in the Foret de Roumare is also one of the easiest to reach: it stands at the forest edge beside the D351, a few steps off the tarmac rather than a kilometre into the trees.

120-150 years · Foret Verte, near Bois-Guillaume

Trees usually turn colour at their own speed.

120-150 years · Foret Verte, near Houppeville

The register praises this beech for being straight, which sounds like faint praise and is not.

75-90 years · Foret de Roumare, between Canteleu and Sahurs

Two of this beech's branches have grown into each other and welded shut, which is how it got its name.

40-60 years · Foret de La Londe-Rouvray, near Orival / Les Essarts, overlooking the Seine

Several beech trunks have come up inside the walls of a ruined castle, and the walls are losing.

450 years · Montagne Noire, near Sorèze

The town of Sorèze gives this beech a crown ninety metres across, close to the length of a football pitch, carried on a trunk six metres round.

Parc de l'Orangerie

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.

175-350 years · Monte Bondone (above Sopramonte and Candriai)

Four and a half metres of trunk, and nothing else growing within reach of its branches.