The Fern-leaved Beech of the Rathauspark

Four hundred and forty-nine trees are individually registered in the Rathauspark and this one has the thickest trunk of the lot, six metres around, beating the park's famous plane trees by a few centimetres. It is also the strangest looking. A fern-leaved beech is a cultivated freak of the common beech whose leaves come out shredded into narrow ribbons, so from a distance the canopy reads as feathery rather than solid, and up close you keep checking whether you are looking at a beech at all. Vienna gave it legal protection in July 1973, the same day it protected three of the park's planes. Its trunk is the reason to come. Rather than one clean column it goes up as a fused mass of grey limbs that split at head height and lean outward in every direction, with the roots buttressing out across bare earth where a century and a half of feet have worn the grass away. Generations of Viennese have carved initials into it, all healed over into pale scars. The park was laid out in 1873, which is also the year the city gives as this tree's planting, so it has stood in front of the town hall for as long as there has been a town hall to stand in front of.