The Volunteer Park Copper Beech

Two measurements taken nineteen years apart put this copper beech at almost exactly the same height: 92 feet when the tree expert Arthur Lee Jacobson recorded it in 2000, and 94 feet when the city surveyed it in 2019. Nineteen years, two feet: this beech was already near its full height when the century began. The trunk is the bigger number. The city gives the trunk as 71 inches across at chest height, which comes to roughly 18 and a half feet round. A Capitol Hill writer, drawing on Jacobson's records in 2015, called it the largest copper beech in Seattle, and the city lists it as one of its Heritage Trees. A copper beech is a purple-leaved form of the European beech, so this is an Old World tree grown up on the far side of North America. It stands in Volunteer Park, behind the building that houses the Seattle Asian Art Museum, a short walk from the park's giant sequoia. Its leaves open purple in spring and turn copper before they fall, which is where the name comes from. What nobody has published is when it was planted. The city's measurements say what it has become and nothing about when it began. If you know, or know who would, tell us, because the age is the one number this page is missing.