The Copper Beech of Situlistraße

Purple leaves are a handicap. A copper beech is an ordinary beech carrying a mutation that floods its foliage with anthocyanin, which masks the chlorophyll underneath and cuts the light the leaf can actually put to work. In a wild forest that is a losing hand: purple seedlings are outgrown by green ones and vanish. The tree only exists in numbers because gardeners liked the colour and kept propagating what the forest would have discarded. This is the second protected beech at Situlistraße 73-75 in Freimann. Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance lists it separately from the weeping beech about 70 metres away, calling it a dominant tree that defines the local townscape and unique in the area, which for a document that mostly says mighty and dominant counts as enthusiasm. What the ordinance does not list is a date, a girth or a height. It records reasons for protection and nothing else, and no other source has measured this tree, so the beech is documented in law and entirely undated. The handicap gets paid off for about a fortnight a year. The new leaves open in late April and early May a thin luminous red you can see the sun through, then thicken and darken all summer towards something close to black. In August it is the heaviest looking thing on the street. In May it is the brightest.