The Copper Beech of the Palmengarten

The Palmengarten opened in 1871. This beech was already 56 years old. Frankfurt's tree cadastre dates its planting to 1815, the year of Waterloo, which makes it older than the garden that now charges people to come and look at it. It is a grafted copper beech, which is how nearly all of them are made. The purple-leaved form does not come reliably true from seed, so a shoot of it is joined onto ordinary green beech rootstock, and on an old specimen you can often still find the join low on the trunk. A surveyor measured it at four and a half metres round in August 2022 and recorded its condition as vital. The city listed it as a natural monument in 2025, under the heading of beauty and rarity, which is an unusually frank thing for a register to write down. It stands out on the meadow in the middle section of the park with room around it, so the whole low, wide crown is readable at once rather than in pieces through other trees. Come in late April or May rather than in August. The new leaves open translucent red and only darken through the summer, and by high season the tree has gone almost black-purple and lost half of what makes the walk worth it.