Among the trees in the Grünewald you can eas­i­ly notice the “con­joined beech­es”, not far from here. This strange shape is not the result of a nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­non, but prob­a­bly of a human inter­ven­tion: the lat­er­al branch­es had been put togeth­er very early.

Prob­a­bly two of these branch­es with the same width had been bev­elled and super­posed in order to make them grow together.

“Con­joi­ned bee­ches” No freak of nature !

This union was eas­i­ly pos­si­ble, as the young beech branch­es were strong enough to regen­er­ate and scar over the cut sur­face. While grow­ing; the cen­tral part of a tree is always cov­ered by an out­er lay­er of cam­bi­um, the so-called grow­ing zone. This zone pro­duces new tis­sue in two direc­tions: wood (xylem) inward­ly and bast (phloem) out­wards. The bark is formed from old bast. The lac­er­a­tion of the lat­er­al branch­es could scar with the help of a spe­cial tis­sue called “cal­lus”, made by the pres­ence of cam­bi­um. Lat­er on the cut wound had been dressed with the help of raf­fia or rub­ber rib­bons or a thick wax lay­er had been spread. And with the time pass­ing by two sin­gle beech­es became one dou­ble struc­tured beech.

The dress­ing and sol­der­ing of two branch­es of dif­fer­ent species is a com­mon graft pro­ce­dure in horticulture.

“Hunnefiels”

Not far from the Roman “Kiem” there lays a huge sand­stone rock, called “Hun­nefiels”. It is sup­posed that its alcoves were inhab­it­ed in pre­his­toric times. The name “Hun­nefiels” still valid today, comes from the times when the Huns did occu­py the region.