The Copper Beech of Parc Pescatore

The state put this tree under protection and then wrote nothing else about it. It appears in the Grand Ducal regulation of 31 January 2025 as entry 129, a copper beech in Parc Pescatore, and that is the whole of the public record: no age, no girth, no height, no photograph. Its neighbours in the same park have done considerably better. The horse chestnut a short walk away has a planting year, a name, a plaque and a cage. What is actually there is a copper beech, the purple-leaved form of the common beech, in a city-centre park off Avenue Marie-Therese that also holds sculpture and several other listed trees. In late April and May it does the thing the form is planted for, opening its new leaves a translucent red before they darken down for the summer. By August it reads almost black against everything around it. If you go, the two useful things to come back with are a tape measure round the trunk at chest height and a photograph. Either one would tell us more about this particular tree than the register manages, and the register is currently the only thing that knows it exists.