Horticultural Highlight
On the west side of Central Avenue across from Story Chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery is a striking specimen of Fagus sylvatica 'Atropunicea' - more commonly known as a Purple-Leaf European Beech.
With a large stocky trunk, a rounded spreading crown and branches which often grow close to the ground, the European beech is native to the British Isles and continental Europe and is best suited to a location with plenty of room to flourish.
One of the most popular beeches in cultivation, the European Beech is a large deciduous tree with soft, thin, smooth, light grayish-blue bark. Many historians have noted that early written manuscripts - possibly even dating back to the first Sanskrit characters - were written on tablets of beech-wood or carved into the bark of the tree itself. According to literary scholars, the actual word "book" can be traced back to the German "buche" or the Anglo-Saxon "boc" both of which derive from the term "beece" or beech.
Remembering "A Royal Tree"
On May 3, 2008, Mount Auburn Cemetery will hold a special tree planting ceremony to commemorate the loss of another beech tree, our famous Prince of Wales Beech.
The Prince of Wales Beech tree was planted Friday, October 19, 1860, by the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria's son, who later became King Edward VII. The tree that will be installed in place of the lost beech, due to the somewhat magical practice of horticultural grafting, is a cutting from the original tree, now a 15-foot-tall scion. The Cemetery will transplant the scion, a
genetically identical offspring of the venerable beech, to Bigelow Chapel Lawn, the place where the original once stood.
In 1996, Mount Auburn's Prince of Wales Beech was the focus of a major preservation initiative that included removing a paved road near the trunk of the tree to ease a condition known as Beech Tree Decline which had originally been diagnosed in 1982. Despite efforts to ease the decline of the tree, sound wave imaging captured in March 2007 revealed that more than 50% of the wood in the trunk of the tree was unsound - posing a potential risk to public safety.
View a slideshow of Mount Auburn's Prince of Wales Beech (1860 - 2008) throughout the years at the Cemetery. For photo details during the slideshow, roll your cursor across the image and a description will pop-up along the bottom-edge of the frame.
Learn more about Mount Auburn's horticultural collections.
