Copper Beech

150-200 years · Watermael-Boitsfort

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.

Schwabing-Freimann

Purple leaves are a handicap.

120 years · Alkmaarderhout / Westerhoutpark

Storm Poly came through Alkmaar on 5 July 2023 and felled more than five hundred trees in an afternoon, with roughly two hundred more damaged badly enough to matter.

Capitol Hill

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...

130 years · Grachtengordel, Amsterdam-Centrum

The best evidence for this tree's age is a photograph.

Kladow, Spandau

Berlin declared this copper beech a natural monument in 1993, growing inside Landhausgarten Dr.

Mitte

The square in front of Berlin's natural history museum holds five protected trees, and the two that give the group its name are copper beeches, one off each wing of the building.

225-275 years · Centrum

The national register does not usually tell you a tree is going to die.

160 years · Willemskade

For most of its life this beech was half of something else.

156-166 years · City centre

This copper beech used to have a twin.

155-165 years · Scheepvaartkwartier

Schoonoord holds roughly a thousand species of plants and trees inside a garden barely bigger than a football pitch, and this copper beech is one of only two survivors from the day its original lay...

135 years · Scheepvaartkwartier

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...

190 years · Leidschendam-Voorburg

A copper beech is an ordinary beech with a fault in it.

190 years · Leidschendam-Voorburg

The register gives this tree no street address.

190 years · Leidschendam-Voorburg

Landscape gardeners put copper beeches beside water deliberately.

160 years · Leidschendam-Voorburg

Trees last longest on ground nobody will ever build on.

75 years · Downtown / McGill campus

At roughly 75 years old this is one of the youngest trees on this map, and the city still counts it among the largest purple beeches on Mont-Royal.

100 years · Döbling (19th district)

This copper beech was the last of four.

240 years · Cambridge, Mid-Cambridge/University Park (within the day-trip boundary; on the Red Line corridor)

This is Cambridge's only living Historic Landmark, and it was made one in 1985 to stop a building.

130 years · Strijp

Strijp was its own village until 1919, and this copper beech is older than the annexation that folded it into Eindhoven.

135-190 years · Binnenstad

Utrecht's own tree register cannot agree with itself about this copper beech.

165 years · Binnenstad / Lucasbolwerk

This copper beech carries a health warning rather than just an age.

140 years · Binnenstad / Servaasbolwerk

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.

126-136 years · Servaasbolwerk

This stretch of canal has a beech problem, and it is worth saying out loud before you go looking.

225-275 years · Hees

This copper beech is older than the church beside it.

165-175 years · Centrum

The name of the square says what happened here: a pig market, and a lively livestock trade for a long time.

101-146 years · Centrum

Nobody, including the register that lists them, is sure which of these three beeches is the old one.

185-195 years · 't Zand

The church went up between 1881 and 1883.

156-166 years · Zonnehof

This copper beech stands where Amersfoort's old public library used to be, on the east side of the Zonnehof, and it has outlasted the building it once stood beside.

135-145 years · Centrum

It is at the back entrance of a function venue, which is a demotion, and it is the reason to look.

135-145 years · Zonnehof

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.

196-237 years · Berchem

Nobody can say for certain which revolution this tree commemorates, only that it commemorates one.

185 years · Binnenstad

This tree is named after a student who wrote one of the Netherlands' best-loved books while it was still young.

~150 years · Kenaupark

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...

180 years · Velperweg / Rosendaal area

The house is from the 1930s.

155-165 years · Van Nahuysplein

A dark tree next to moving water was somebody's decision.

116-166 years · Binnenstad

The purple is a mask.

140 years · Groot Wezenland, edge of Assendorp

A fence went up beside this beech, and the tree has been taking it in ever since.

120 years · Spoolde, Park 't Engelse Werk

A copper beech planted at the water's edge around the time the 20th century began, and still standing there: that is what the national monumental tree register records in the southern part of Park...

205 years · De Worp

A copper beech planted in 1822 was an early one, and in a public park it was very early indeed.

145-155 years · Horst

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.

140 years · Mierlo-Hout

The present church is younger than the trees standing behind it.

130 years · Centrum

Nobody has ever put a tape around this tree, which is the first thing a big copper beech makes you want to do.

150-200 years · Landgoed Groeneveld (Staatsbosbeheer estate)

At 5.28 metres around, this is the thickest beech on the Groeneveld estate, and the number comes with an asterisk.

225-275 years · Nieuw-Schoonebeek

The church is gone and only the tower is left.

130 years

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...

Česká Lípa

The state protects a circle twelve metres wide around this copper beech, and the circle sits on a street corner beside a hospital.

210 years · Westend-Süd

The Palmengarten opened in 1871.

150-300 years · Frýdlant, Liberec Region

Frýdlant protected this beech by drawing a circle around it.

Sint-Annaplein / Zuid

This beech has a trunk 4.26 metres round and no birthday.

135-175 years · Rotherbaum

Ask how thick this beech is and you get three answers, all of them correct.

160 years · Oosterpoort

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.

132-220 years · Jihlava town centre, Vysočina Region

A group of Jihlava students campaigned this beech to the national Tree of the Year title in the autumn of 2003.

Ville Haute

The state put this tree under protection and then wrote nothing else about it.

Monte, Funchal

The last Emperor of Austria died in this garden.

135 years · Downtown / Portland State University campus

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.

Priekulė, Klaipėda district

The writer Ieva Simonaitytė spent her summers in the house this beech stands beside, and that house is now her memorial museum.

175 years · Nispen

The thickest beech in Roosendaal's part of the national tree register is really three trunks grown into one.

160 years

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.

Neustadt, University quarter

Purple-leaved beeches are a mutation that gardeners decided to keep.

200 years · Arboretum Wojslawice

In 2024 a beech from a small Silesian arboretum became Europe's tree of the year, beating every other national champion on the continent.

140 years · Zaandam

This tree's own file cannot agree with itself about its age.