The Villa Beech

Copper beech is not a species. It is a colour fault in the ordinary green European beech, a mutation that turns up now and then in the wild and has been kept going ever since by gardeners, because seedlings from a purple parent mostly come up green. Copper beeches are planted, in other words, rather than found. Somebody put this one between the Sonsbeek villa and its pond somewhere between 1830 and 1840, and the result is a dark red canopy in the middle of a green park. That is close to everything anybody knows about it. The national register lists it as a monumental tree of roughly 190 years and leaves the history field blank: no storm, no famous owner, no anecdote, just a large old beech doing what beeches do, holding a dense low canopy that shades out nearly everything beneath it. Go in May rather than August. Copper beech is at its best in the first weeks after the leaves break, when they are still thin enough to pass light and the shade underneath turns the colour of weak red wine; by high summer the same canopy has gone almost black. It stands on open lawn near the villa, free, every day, and needs no more directions than that. Nobody outside the register has written this tree down, so if you know who planted it, or when, we would like to hear from you.