The Copper Beech of Sint Trudo Churchyard

Strijp was its own village until 1919, and this copper beech is older than the annexation that folded it into Eindhoven. It stands in the churchyard of the Sint Trudokerk, part of a monumental avenue of beeches that lines the entrance on both sides, graves running in rows beneath them toward a small hill topped with a cross. The church itself has had a rough run for a building not yet a century and a half old: consecrated in 1887, damaged by fire in 1936, rebuilt with a new tower over 1937 and 1938, then bomb damaged again in 1944, with repairs not finished until 1949. The beech avenue beside it, planted in the 1890s, predates every one of those disasters and outlasted them all. The tree register lists three more copper beeches within a stone's throw, close enough together that they read as one avenue rather than four separate specimens worth visiting on their own. This is the one the register singles out by coordinate, multi-stemmed and roughly 130 years old, in an ordinary Catholic churchyard that has quietly kept growing through a century its own parish church did not get to enjoy.