The Copper Beech of Place de l'Université

Purple-leaved beeches are a mutation that gardeners decided to keep. Copper beech is the same species as the green European beech, one that occasionally throws a seedling whose leaves carry so much red pigment that the green underneath barely shows, and the European ones descend from a handful of such accidents found in German and Swiss forests from the 1600s onward. Nurseries have propagated them ever since for exactly this job: one dark tree in a formal civic square. This one is 26 metres tall with a trunk over 330 centimetres around, among the largest specimens on the city's list. It stands on Place de l'Universite in front of the Palais Universitaire, the enormous neo-Renaissance block the German administration put up in the 1880s when it rebuilt Strasbourg's university as a showpiece of imperial science. The tree belongs to that project, in a square designed as its forecourt. Since then the university has been German, French, German again and French again, evacuated wholesale to Clermont-Ferrand during the Second World War, and put back together. The beech stayed. No age is on record, and the city's register is the only source describing it. In late spring the new leaves are almost translucent red before they darken. By high summer the crown is dense enough to leave the ground beneath it nearly bare.