The Van Hogenhoucklaan Beech

This beech has added about a centimetre of girth a year for the last three decades, and that number is the reason anyone looked twice at it. The Van Hogenhoucklaan was laid out with its houses around 1930, and the beeches along it, mixed with American limes and a few oaks, look like they went in with the street. This one does not. It is noticeably thicker than its neighbours, and a tree growing at a centimetre a year is not one that got fat quickly; it is one that has been at it a great deal longer. The register's own surveyor lands on the first half of the 19th century, which would make it roughly a century older than the road it lines. That is an estimate rather than a date, and it is the honest kind: a measured trunk, a measured growth rate, and a conclusion stated as a probability instead of a year. Beech keeps smooth grey bark for life, so age never shows in the surface the way it does on an oak. It shows in the diameter, which is exactly what caught the surveyor's eye. Stand at the end of the green strip and look down the row. The odd one out is not hard to find.