1) besought, besought or regular beseeched: to ask someone fervently and urgently to do sth
2) tree-like structure

Link to present incidents:
In 1904, Wilson Bentley (a Vermont farmer, Sm), who developed an apparatus to photograph snowflakes in the 1880s, beseeched the Smithsonian to care for his collection (...) The classification system he developed for flakes, which included flowerlike plates, star-shaped stellar dendrites, capped columns, needles and more, is still used today (though it's since been expanded to more than 120 categories).
The Washington Post