The Copper Beech of the Sint Lucia Churchyard

The present church is younger than the trees standing behind it. Sint-Luciakerk was finished in 1896; the national register of monumental trees puts this pair of copper beeches in the ground between 1880 and 1890, which makes them roughly a hundred and forty years old. There are two of them, recorded as a single entry, standing together in the kerkhof behind the church and both left in their natural form rather than pruned or shaped. The purple is not something a breeder designed. It is a pigment fault that turns up now and then in an ordinary green beech, and nurseries have been grafting that accident ever since. Mierlo-Hout became a parish in its own right on 1 September 1884, and the church, the presbytery and the burial ground went up in stages between 1856 and the 1920s. Whether these two beeches were planted as part of that work is not written down anywhere. The register dates them; the parish histories that describe the building never mention the trees at all. Nobody has measured the trunks either, which for a beech of this age is the one number worth having. The kerkhof is a working Catholic burial ground, open from sunrise to sunset, and Helmond 't Hout station is across the road. If you bring a tape, tell us what it reads.