The Copper Beech of the Kromme Steenweg

Nobody has ever put a tape around this tree, which is the first thing a big copper beech makes you want to do. The purple leaf is a mutation. It turns up now and then among ordinary green beeches and gets propagated on purpose, because people liked the colour enough to keep it going. Dutch calls the result a rode beuk, a red beech, which is closer to what the leaf actually does: it opens red in spring and darkens through the summer until it reads almost black against a grey sky. This one went into a municipal green strip on the Kromme Steenweg somewhere between 1890 and 1900. The national monumental tree register gives that decade band and does not narrow it, so neither do we. Helmond's own tree catalogue, the 2009 amendment that put the town's protected trees on a map, lists it at number 4 in the company of a horse chestnut and two planes. That is the entire documented record. No girth, no height, no note of who chose it or why. What is on the ground is a large purple beech on a public verge, nine minutes' walk from the centre of town, still on the protected list seventeen years after that catalogue was drawn up. If you know its measurements, or when it went in, tell us.