Common hornbeam barely grows wild anywhere on the Iberian peninsula, which makes the specimen in Barcelona's Jardi Botanic Historic an outlier by definition.
Hornbeam
Carpinus betulus is Europe's shear-proof hedge tree, planted by the thousand for its density and its patience under a blade, which is why a hornbeam left alone to grow into its full, fluted-trunked shape reads as a surprise. This page maps every hornbeam on the site, 7 so far across 7 cities.
Three stand mapped here, none of them clipped. Aarhus's, in Moesgard's landscape garden, was measured in 2022 at nineteen metres, taller than the species usually reads, its only flaw a little shade thrown by nearby planes. Copenhagen's, in Frederiksberg Have, carries no age or measurement on the Danish national register at all, only a name, Suttetraeet, the pacifier tree, harvested bare every November when local toddlers tie up the dummy they have agreed to give up. Nijmegen's grows a few metres from Krayenhoffpark's giant sequoia, roughly the same age at around 120 years, the only shade in its railway district older than the houses around it.
Barcelona
Copenhagen
Every November this hornbeam gets harvested.
Nijmegen
This hornbeam stands close enough to Krayenhoffpark's giant sequoia to be mistaken for an afterthought planted in the famous tree's shadow, but it is roughly the same age and belongs to a species t...
Munich
Hornbeam is the hardest wood in the European forest, and it was never meant to become a tree like this.
Utrecht
Hornbeam is the hardest wood in Europe, which is why it was cut for the things that got hit: mill cogs, ox yokes, butcher's blocks.
York
Photo: habiloid (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The Cut-Leaved Hornbeam's trunk is hollow, its canopy hangs low enough to brush the grass, and the whole tree curls into itself rather than growing straight up, more contorted shrub than the neat s...
Aarhus
The surveyor who measured this hornbeam filed a small complaint along with the numbers: a fine tree, but it stands a little in the shade of some plane trees.
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