The Alois-Drasche-Park Beech

When a city protects a tree for its profile, it is saying something simple: this one shapes the neighbourhood. Vienna entered the beech of the Alois-Drasche-Park in June 2018 as Natural Monument 842, and its description is exactly that, a mighty free-standing crown that marks the character of its surroundings. A beech grows into that shape only when nothing has crowded it for a long time. The city's tree cadastre puts the planting at 1895, which makes it about 130 years old, and records the trunk at 337 centimetres round and the height in the 21 to 25 metre class. A planting year in a cadastre is a record rather than a birth certificate, so read the age as a broad range, but it fits the girth: a beech with a trunk like this is a large tree by any standard. The park is a small green block in Wieden, a short walk from the Hauptbahnhof, and the beech is the thing in it you notice from a distance. A Serbian spruce and a yew stand beside it, both recorded in the cadastre as planted around 2000. They make a useful scale: the beech has been growing for more than four times as long as either. It is one of the more recently protected Natural Monuments in the register, and one of the easiest to reach.