Hornbeam is the hardest wood in the European forest, and it was never meant to become a tree like this.
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Hornbeam
Carpinus betulus
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. We map 11 of them, in 10 cities.
Salzburg's, outside the old biology institute on Freisaalweg, is put at more than 200 years and carries a strikingly round, globe-shaped crown on several stems. York's cut-leaved hornbeam is hollow and curls into itself, its canopy low enough to brush the grass. Copenhagen's in Frederiksberg Have is the Pacifier Tree, harvested bare every November of the dummies local toddlers tie to it. And Enschede shows what the hedge habit can do at scale: the Beukenberceau of Van Heekpark, the beech arbour, is about a hundred hornbeams clipped into a green tunnel for about a century, and contains no beech at all.
Munich
Barcelona
Common hornbeam barely grows wild anywhere on the Iberian peninsula, which makes the specimen in Barcelona's Jardi Botanic Historic an outlier by definition.
Copenhagen
Every November this hornbeam gets harvested.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
The figure in the register, 4.16 metres, is not a trunk.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
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...
York
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...
Photo: habiloid (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Salzburg
This hornbeam is all that is left of a villa garden, and for years it was the tree outside Salzburg University's biology department.
Enschede
The beech arbour of Van Heekpark contains no beech.
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.
Graz
Graz protected this hornbeam in 2019, and the register gives it nothing else: no age, no girth, no story beyond a plot number in the cadastral map of St.
Rouen
These two made an official remarkable-tree register on the strength of a pose.
Explore by city: Munich · Barcelona · Copenhagen · Nijmegen · York · Salzburg · Enschede · Aarhus · Graz · every city · or browse all species.