The Copper Beech of Kirschbergstrasse

This copper beech is 23 metres tall on Leipzig's register, and the most recent proof we can find that it still stands is a photograph taken in June 2015. That is the honest state of it. The city protects the tree as natural monument number 64, at Kirschbergstrasse 48 in Moeckern, under council resolution 601/96. The register gives a height and nothing more: no girth, no age, no date of planting. And nobody seems to have photographed or logged it since. Beeches are not immortal, and a decade is a long silence. If you walk past, tell us whether it is still there, and if you know how old it is, tell us that too. Moeckern is a name in the history books. On 16 October 1813, on the first day of the Battle of Leipzig, Prussian and French troops fought over the village street by street, and it changed hands several times. Nobody claims this beech saw it, and with no age on record nobody could. What it would show you is colour. A copper beech is a European beech with purple leaves, and at 23 metres this one is a big example of a tree people usually plant for the effect: the leaves open a translucent red in spring, darken almost to black by summer and turn copper before they fall. The pin is the register's point only, and whether the tree stands on public ground or inside the plot is not established. Look from the street.