Munich protects this beech partly because people are fond of it.
Weeping Beech
Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula'
A weeping beech makes a room. We map 20 of them, in 18 cities.
The branches drop from the top of the trunk to the ground in a closed curtain, and the space inside is dark, hollow and tall enough to stand up in, which is most of the reason cities hold on to them. Munich's ordinance is unusually frank about that: the reason recorded for protecting the beech by the Schwanenbrucke is that people are fond of it. The same city protects a second one on Situlistrasse on the grounds that it is the largest weeping beech standing in Munich, and says so in its own paperwork. The Leiden tree, about 185 years old in the Hortus, has the longest paper trail, running back to the London nurseryman George Loddiges. Copenhagen's grows in Assistens, the cemetery the city treats as a park.
Munich
By the city's own reckoning this is the largest weeping beech standing in Munich.
Breda
The lowest branches of this beech touch the ground and can root back into it, so what looks like one tree is quietly capable of becoming a ring of them.
Groningen
Autumn colour
A glass wall exists in Groningen because of this tree.
Copenhagen
Autumn colour
Every weeping beech is a graft, and on this one the join is in plain sight.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Autumn colour
This beech is eating a fence.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Dresden
Autumn colour
Of the two weeping beeches this park was protected for, one now lies on the grass.
Photo: Dr. Bernd Gross (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Nijmegen
Autumn colour
A weeping beech droops on purpose.
Leiden
Autumn colour
An Englishman gave this tree its first paper trail.
Photo: Rudolphous (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Haarlem
Autumn colour
Prinsenhof has been a garden for longer than Haarlem has had a monarchy to name a park after: a monastery garden from before 1477, when the monastery's own graveyard took over the ground, then in 1...
Enschede
Autumn colour
Go inside it.
Zwolle
Autumn colour
The garden around this weeping beech was designed by a poet who was also the mayor of Zwolle.
Deventer
Autumn colour
A weeping beech in a nineteenth century cemetery is not a coincidence, it is a convention.
Helmond
Autumn colour
Almost everything planted at this cemetery weeps.
Heinkenszand
Autumn colour
Walk in under this beech and you are standing in a room about twenty-four metres across.
Assen
Autumn colour
Behind a house called Nieuw Echten, reached only by a footpath squeezed between two front doors on Alteveerstraat, sits a pocket garden nobody driving past would guess exists.
Frankfurt
Autumn colour
This beech has been quietly making more of itself.
Freiburg
Autumn colour
The State of Baden-Württemberg owned the plot, wanted to build on it, and lost to the tree.
Photo: Andreas Schwarzkopf (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Haarlemmermeer
The register's own 2024 inspection ends on an unusually candid note: the tree, it says, is not doing well these days.
Lausanne
The trunk this tree started with broke on the night of 20 June 2021, in a storm.
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