The Rivers Purple Beech of Linda Hall Library

European beech is a tree of cool, damp woodland. Kansas City summers are neither, which is what makes this one quietly impressive. 'Riversii' is a selected purple form of the common European beech, kept going by grafting because the colour does not come reliably from seed. The leaves open a deep red-purple in spring and hold close to it through the season, so this is one of the few trees on these grounds with no single week that beats the others. It looks like this in June and it looks like this in September. It went into the ground in 1971 as Rosehill Nursery stock and carries the tag 14-2-1 on the Greater Kansas City champion list, the largest of its kind anybody in the metro has registered. At the 2008 survey the trunk was 85 inches round, 216 centimetres, under a crown 43 feet tall. The same table gives its spread as 42 inches, which would make it a broomstick; it is almost certainly 42 feet and a slipped unit, so we have left the number out rather than quietly repair somebody else's arithmetic. Everything above comes from one institution counted twice, the library's arboretum pages and its own subject guide. Nobody outside has put a tape around this trunk, and the last figures anyone published are nearly two decades old. If you have measured it more recently, tell us and we will update it.