The Copper Beech of the St Victorkerk

This copper beech grows out of paving. The national tree register records the ground around it, by Batenburg's Oude or St Victorkerk, as closed paving, and out of it rises a trunk 5.10 metres round. That is a big copper beech. The one at the gate of Nispen's cemetery near Roosendaal is 4.90 metres round, and that girth belongs to three stems fused into one. The Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen bands this tree's planting to the 1880s, so it is about 140 years old, and puts it at 20 metres tall. It carries an old injury. A large limb once broke out of it, and the register notes that the wound has partly rotted, with the flat brackets of the artist's fungus, Ganoderma lipsiense, growing from it, and asks for regular checks. An inspector saw the tree in May 2026 and kept it on the list as monumental, so it is standing and watched. Come in late October or early November, when the purple leaves turn copper before they fall. In May the other reason to be here is in flower: the horse chestnut in the church garden, about 40 metres away, planted twenty years later and almost exactly the same girth at 5.08 metres. Batenburg is a village on the Maas in the municipality of Wijchen, about 16 kilometres west of Nijmegen. The register lists the beech as public and open to visitors, on the church square at Grotestraat 11A.