The Copper Beech of the Westerkerk

The national register does not usually tell you a tree is going to die. About this one it does. In the 1990s the ground it roots in was compacted, which for a beech is close to the worst thing that can be done to it: the fine feeding roots sit in the top half metre of soil and they need air in it. The tree took a blow it never came back from. The ground has since been improved and its condition has not recovered, and the register states plainly that it will in time have to be felled. It is the oldest tree in Leeuwarden, banded 1750 to 1800, standing by a church whose history runs back to the fifteenth century and which has been reworked repeatedly for the different uses it has been put to. There is nothing tragic to look at. A declining old beech is still an enormous dark thing on a city street, and the decline is mostly visible in what is missing: thinner cover at the top of the crown, more light coming through than there should be, dead ends on the upper branches. This is the only tree on this site we would tell you to see sooner rather than later.