The Copper Beech of the Upper Garden

Copper beeches were a fashion, and this one arrived at the height of it. The purple-leaved form of the common beech is a natural mutation. It turns up on its own now and then in European woods, and from the eighteenth century onward nurseries learned to graft it and sold it hard to anyone laying out a landscape garden. Between 1810 and 1820, when this one went into the back of the upper garden at Het Loo, having one was a statement about being current. Two centuries later the fashion has aged into something better. A copper beech at this size is a dark solid mass of a tree, and in a formal garden built on symmetry and pale gravel it does the useful job of being the one heavy dark thing in the composition. Stand under it rather than in front of it. Beech leaves are thin enough that a mature purple canopy lit from above turns the light underneath a deep red, which is the reason people planted them and the reason the photographs never work. It is at the far end of the Boventuin, behind the formal planting.