The Copper Beech of Sint-Annaplein
This beech has a trunk 4.26 metres round and no birthday. Two records describe how the square around it was planted, and they do not agree. Flanders' heritage inventory calls it an imposing copper beech standing centrally on Sint-Annaplein and says it possibly still dates from the original layout, the square built between 1841 and 1846 to a design by the city architect Lodewijk Roelandt. The register hedges that itself, because the evidence it leans on is an aerial photograph from 1952 and an Albert Sugg photograph from 1953, both showing the central green already planted. That is proof of trees, not of this tree's age. The Dutch Wikipedia entry on the square records something else entirely: chestnuts planted here in 1869. Chestnut is not beech, and 1869 is not the 1840s. So the age field stays empty. Neither source dates this individual beech, and joining the square's construction to the tree standing on it would be an answer nobody actually gave. The trunk is not in doubt. Sint-Annaplein is a traffic roundabout now, with a green centre you can walk onto and a Sacred Heart war memorial raised in 1926, and the beech holds the middle of it, in leaf a deep purple-brown from spring until it drops. If a Ghent planting record settles the date, we would like to see it.
Autumn colour
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sint-Annaplein, GentThe one large purple-leaved tree in the green centre of the roundabout. Nothing else on the square comes close to its size.
Free, public square, open at all times
De Lijn bus stops on Keizer Karelstraat and Nieuwebosstraat, on the square itself; Woodrow Wilsonplein stop about 150m away; Gent-Sint-Pieters station roughly 15-20 minutes on foot
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
