The Kenaupark Red Beech

This copper beech stands in front of a 19th-century villa with the kind of theatrical, deep purple-red canopy that looks almost too deliberately composed to be real, the sort of tree that would not look out of place backing a formal portrait, if the painters of Haarlem's Golden Age had lived to see Kenaupark built. The park itself dates from 1865, designed by the father-and-son landscape architects Zocher, the same family behind Haarlemmerhout's redesign a century earlier and the Kleverlaan cemetery, laid out on the site of the old city fortifications after Haarlem's walls came down and the ground beneath them needed a new purpose. Kenaupark takes its name from Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer, a Haarlem woman celebrated, with some historical exaggeration, for helping defend the city during the 1572-73 Spanish siege, one of the few Dutch women from that era whose name survived into a public square's naming. The beech itself has no precise recorded planting date, though its size and the park's own founding year point toward roughly a century and a half of growth. It shares the park with monumental planes, a cypress grove, oaks, a walnut and a stand of chestnuts, all part of the same original planting a Haarlem council chose to make graceful rather than merely functional out of a demolished fortress line.