The best evidence for this tree's age is a photograph.
Copper Beech
Every copper beech in Europe descends from an accident. This page maps every copper beech on the site, 47 so far across 34 cities.
The purple leaf is a mutation that turns up at random in wild green beech forests, and it is a handicap rather than an advantage: the pigment masks the chlorophyll underneath and cuts the light the leaf can put to work, so purple seedlings are outgrown by green ones and vanish. The tree exists in numbers only because gardeners in German and Swiss forests found the freak worth keeping and propagated it, and because it does not come true from seed it is usually grafted. Leiden's was grafted low onto a green rootstock, and two centuries of mismatched growth rates have left it with a broad gnarled base that looks nothing like a beech. Boston's is the only living Historic Landmark in Cambridge, designated in 1985 to stop a building. Eleven cities hold the thirteen mapped here, from Portland to Porto.
Amsterdam
Brussels
Alfred Solvay, brother of the industrial chemist Ernest Solvay, built a country manor at the edge of the Sonian Forest in 1878, and the park around it still carries his family's name today.
Nijmegen
This copper beech is older than the church beside it.
Porto
Architects travel to this campus for the buildings.
The Hague
A copper beech is an ordinary beech with a fault in it.
The register gives this tree no street address.
Nearly all of a mature beech's roots sit in the top half metre of soil, spread about as wide as the crown reaches.
Landscape gardeners put copper beeches beside water deliberately.
Trees last longest on ground nobody will ever build on.
Leiden
Photo: Marianne Cornelissen-Kuyt (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Two beech varieties grafted together, growing at different rates for two centuries, is why this one looks nothing like a normal beech.
This tree is named after a student who wrote one of the Netherlands' best-loved books while it was still young.
Berlin
Berlin declared this copper beech a natural monument in 1993, growing inside Landhausgarten Dr.
Munich
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Every copper beech in Europe descends from an accident.
Purple leaves are a handicap.
Utrecht
Utrecht's own tree register cannot agree with itself about this copper beech.
This copper beech carries a health warning rather than just an age.
Two beeches stand roughly 45 metres apart on the same small stretch of Servaasbolwerk, and it is easy to walk past one thinking you have already seen the other.
This stretch of canal has a beech problem, and it is worth saying out loud before you go looking.
This copper beech was planted to be looked at and remembered, not simply grown.
Boston
This is Cambridge's only living Historic Landmark, and it was made one in 1985 to stop a building.
Haarlem
This copper beech stands in front of a 19th-century villa with the kind of theatrical, deep purple-red canopy that looks almost too deliberately composed to be real, the sort of tree that would not...
Rotterdam
Fifteen grand townhouses built between 1888 and 1891 once earned this small square a joking nickname, Rijkeluishofje, the rich people's almshouse, a dig at how sheltered and comfortable its wealthy...
Leipzig
Photo: Edlerin (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Copper beeches were a fashionable planting across nineteenth century Europe, their near-black foliage a deliberate contrast to the ordinary green beech beside them, and this one has grown large eno...
Den Bosch
The city register gives this beech an age of zero.
Antwerp
Nobody can say for certain which revolution this tree commemorates, only that it commemorates one.
Amersfoort
The church went up between 1881 and 1883.
It is at the back entrance of a function venue, which is a demotion, and it is the reason to look.
The Zonnehof is a piece of open ground on the edge of the old centre that the twentieth century got hold of, and this beech was standing before any of it.
Apeldoorn
Copper beeches were a fashion, and this one arrived at the height of it.
A generation younger than the beech at the back of the upper garden, and planted where it would be reflected.
Baarn
At 5.28 metres around, this is the thickest beech on the Groeneveld estate, and the number comes with an asterisk.
Deventer
A copper beech planted in 1822 was an early one, and in a public park it was very early indeed.
Dordrecht
The name of the square says what happened here: a pig market, and a lively livestock trade for a long time.
Eindhoven
This is the oldest thing standing in Eindhoven, by a wide margin and by the register's own dating: a planting band of 1700 to 1750, so somewhere between about 275 and 325 years.
Emmen
The church is gone and only the tower is left.
Helmond
The wood this beech stands in is a leftover piece of the hunting ground of the lords of Helmont, and the register knows what the farmhands used to eat in it.
Leeuwarden
The national register does not usually tell you a tree is going to die.
Zwolle
A dark tree next to moving water was somebody's decision.
Assen
The same footpath that leads to the weeping beech behind Nieuw Echten passes a second registered tree a few steps further on: a copper beech, its leaves running dark purple-red instead of green, pl...
Frankfurt
The Palmengarten opened in 1871.
Graz
Photo: Kulac (CC BY-SA 3.0 at)
Wikipedia's list places this copper beech at Eggenberger Allee 90 with a set of coordinates that match, to six decimal places, the GPS tag on a photograph taken here in June 2014 and filed on Wikim...
Hoorn
Every copper beech in Europe descends from a handful of freak trees found growing purple in ordinary green forests, most famously in Germany in the seventeenth century.
Madeira
The last Emperor of Austria died in this garden.
Portland
Portland State University knocked down a Victorian mansion to build its library, then laid out the front lawn around the tree that had stood beside it.
Sittard-Geleen
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.
Strasbourg
Purple-leaved beeches are a mutation that gardeners decided to keep.
Zaanstad
This tree's own file cannot agree with itself about its age.
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