The Dumbarton Oaks Beech Grove

Beatrix Farrand did not plant these beeches. When she laid out the park below Dumbarton Oaks around 1930, the American beech grove at the Lovers' Lane gate was already standing and already old enough to be worth keeping, so she designed around it and made it the way in. Two acres of smooth grey trunks is what you walk through before the park proper starts. Nobody has dated them. American beech is slow, and a grove substantial enough for a landscape architect to build an entrance around in 1930 had to have been there well before her, but there is no ring count and no planting record, so anything more precise than that would be invented. The grove carries a survey number, HALS DC-13, filed at the Library of Congress under the same witness tree program that recorded the tulip poplar up the hill in Montrose Park. It has also had a hard century. When the Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy started work in 2012, this grove was the first thing it took on, clearing invasive growth and rebuilding the way water moves down the slope, and that work is still running. One thing to sort out before you go: this park is free, open and run by the Park Service. The formal gardens next door, on the same estate's old ground, charge admission and are a different visit entirely.