The Van Loon Copper Beech

The best evidence for this tree's age is a photograph. In Museum Van Loon's own collection sits a picture from 1923 showing the beech as a young tree, which is what puts its planting in the 1890s and makes it around 130 years old now. It stands in one of the last intact canal-house gardens in Amsterdam. The house at Keizersgracht 672 went up in 1672, its first resident was Ferdinand Bol, who trained in Rembrandt's workshop, and the Van Loon family bought it in 1884. Behind the formal parterres stands a coach house dressed up with a classical front, and the garden between the two survived the century in which most Amsterdam back gardens were built over, subdivided or paved for cars. A copper beech is not a wild plant in any meaningful sense. It is a colour mutation of the common beech that appears now and then in European woods and was propagated by nurseries because people liked the look of it, so every purple beech in a nineteenth-century garden is there because somebody chose it and paid for it. This one was a wealthy family's ornamental decision, taken when their house was already two hundred years old, and it is still standing exactly where they put it. The garden opens with a museum ticket. It is small, walled and quiet, in the middle of a canal ring that is neither.