The Copper Beech of Jardin d'Isabelle

This copper beech grows in the Jardin d'Isabelle, a historic town garden in Sittard, banded by the national register to a planting around 1870, roughly 160 years old. The register attaches an actual story to the site rather than leaving it blank: the poet Charles Beltjens is said to have met his beloved here, in what was already, by the tree's own lifetime, an established city garden rather than a new planting. Copper beech is a colour variant of the ordinary European beech, its leaves running dark purple-red through summer instead of green, a mutation first found wild and then propagated by grafting and cutting ever since it was noticed. Left to grow in a sheltered garden setting for a century and a half, this one has had about as easy a life as a beech can have: little pruning, no root compaction, room to build the wide, low crown the species produces when nothing crowds it. A European ash of the same age once stood a few steps away; the register records it taken down after a storm in 2010 and replaced by a young ash, so this beech is the garden's old tree now. If you know more of the garden's own history, tell us.