The Beech of Lucasbolwerk

This copper beech carries a health warning rather than just an age. A canal-route survey of Utrecht's monumental trees, last updated in September 2025, reports the tree infected with reuzenzwam, giant polypore, a fungus that rots roots and trunk bases from the inside and has already killed a different Utrecht beech on record a short walk away at the Maliebaan roundabout. As of that September visit the tree did not yet appear to be suffering seriously, in the surveyor's own words, but the infection is real and worth watching rather than ignoring. The Dutch monumental tree register places its planting between 1850 and 1860; the municipality's own separate record says 1870. Both figures are published and neither has been reconciled, so this page gives the wider range, somewhere between 150 and 176 years old. A 2005 survey measured it at four metres thirty around and nineteen metres tall, numbers now two decades old and likely conservative for a tree that has kept growing since. It stands in the open on Lucasbolwerk, the same bastion park as the published Plane of Lucasbolwerk a short walk away. If you visit and the crown looks thin or the bark shows fresh damage near the base, that is worth telling us.