The Grandbos Beech

Nothing about the corner of the Van Soutelandelaan and the Van Mojalenlaan announces a two hundred year old tree. The beech stands in a strip of wood called Le Grandbos, a leftover of the estate landscape that was here before Mariahoeve was built over it, and the register dates the tree to the 1820s. Beech does two things worth the walk. Its bark stays smooth and grey for its whole life, so an old trunk reads more like a column than a tree, without the deep furrows that give an oak of the same age away. And it holds autumn better than almost anything else growing in a Dutch street, going copper in late October and keeping it into November, with the fallen leaves staying orange on the ground for weeks afterwards. Underneath it, very little grows. A mature beech takes so much of the light that the ground under the crown stays bare, which is the easiest way to pick one out of a mixed wood from a distance. An oak of nearly the same vintage stands about two hundred metres off, on the other side of the Van Soutelandelaan, so this is a ten minute detour with two trees in it.