The Copper Beech of Casinotuin

The city register gives this beech an age of zero. That is a blank field rather than a fact, because the trunk measures 4.33 metres round and the crown stands 24 metres up, which no seedling manages. Nobody has dated it, so this page does not either. What has been measured is size, and by that measure it is the thickest tree the register records in the Casinotuin. Copper beech is a purple-leaved form of the common beech, propagated from chance mutations found in the wild and planted through the 19th century for exactly the effect it still has, a mass of dark red over a park where everything else is green. This one grows on the old inner-city water in a garden that a 1996 survey of Den Bosch's oldest trees singled out for its beeches, along with the ramparts across town. A smaller weeping beech stands about 13 metres off, drooping like a closed umbrella, and the two are impossible to mix up once you have seen them side by side. Vitality here reads as normal, the best grade the register awards, which for a tree with no recorded age is the more useful number anyway. What it does not tell you is when somebody planted it, and on current evidence nobody knows.