The Cut-Leaved Hornbeam

The Cut-Leaved Hornbeam's trunk is hollow, its canopy hangs low enough to brush the grass, and the whole tree curls into itself rather than growing straight up, more contorted shrub than the neat street tree hornbeams usually become. That shape earned it a place on the Tree Register's list of Yorkshire county champions, the largest recorded example of its cultivar in the county. Ordinary hornbeam wood is famously hard, historically turned into butchers' blocks and mallets because almost nothing else in an English wood could take that kind of daily battering, and this specimen's finely cut, deeply serrated leaves are the whole reason a gardener chose this cultivar over the plain species when the Yorkshire Philosophical Society was planting out its new grounds around the ruins of St Mary's Abbey in the nineteenth century. In autumn its leaves turn a rich golden brown, and the hollow trunk, rather than weakening the tree, has become one of its most photographed features, a reminder that hollowing out is something old trees do to survive, not a sign they are dying. It stands among the garden's roughly 80 to 150 year old champions, part of a small cluster of record-holding trees inside a single city garden.