Českolipský buk lesní

The state protects a circle twelve metres wide around this copper beech, and the circle sits on a street corner beside a hospital. Its trunk measures 3.85 metres round, a serious waistline for a tree in a patch of town green rather than a castle park. It is not an ordinary beech. The Czech nature conservation agency, AOPK, records it as the purple form, the copper beech, whose leaves open a deep purple in spring and darken through the summer. The agency added it to the national list of memorial trees on 15 October 2010 under a plain working name, Buk lesní v Moskevské ulici, the beech on Moskevská street. Locally it goes by something prouder: Českolipský buk lesní, the beech of Česká Lípa. The park it stands in is barely a park at all, a small square of grass at the corner of Moskevská and U Kartounky, with the hospital next door. Nothing else in it competes for attention. Two things we do not know, and would like to. Nobody has published an age for it, so we will not invent one; if you know when it was planted, tell us. And the most recent dated photograph we could find was taken in 2012. The register still lists the tree as protected and records no loss, which is good news but not the same as somebody having seen it this year. If you walk past, let us know it is standing.