No fern-leaved beech anywhere is much more than two centuries old, because the tree did not exist before about 1804.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Fern-leaved Beech
Fagus sylvatica f. asplenifolia
Genoa's city hall has a beech in its courtyard and its leaves are wrong. We map 6 of them, in 5 cities.
They come out narrow and deeply slashed, closer to a fern frond than to the broad oval a beech is supposed to carry, which is the whole of the fern-leaved beech and the only reason anyone notices one. None can be very old. The form was not around before about 1804 and cannot be relied on to come true from seed, so every specimen is a cutting off another one. Leiden's, planted in the Hortus in 1818, is the oldest in the Netherlands and has grown outward into one enormous low dome. Vienna's, planted in 1873, is six metres round, the thickest of the 449 trees registered in the Rathauspark. Munich registers its two not for size or age but for how rarely the form turns up anywhere in the city.
Munich
Autumn colour
The old trees of the Englischer Garten did not survive by luck.
Photo: Peterf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Leipzig
A fern-leaved beech carries leaves so deeply cut and narrow they barely register as beech foliage at all, a naturally occurring form of the common European beech that nurseries have propagated by g...
Photo: Edlerin (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Vienna
Four hundred and forty-nine trees are individually registered in the Rathauspark and this one has the thickest trunk of the lot, six metres around, beating the park's famous plane trees by a few ce...
Photo: Michael Kranewitter (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)
Copenhagen
Autumn colour
Somebody has sawn branches off this beech and the surveyor who recorded it could not work out why.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Genoa
Autumn colour
Genoa's city hall has a beech in its courtyard, and its leaves are wrong.
Explore by city: Munich · Leipzig · Vienna · Copenhagen · Genoa · Prague · Brussels · Porto · every city · or browse all species.