The Copper Beech at the Voorburg Cemetery Gate

Trees last longest on ground nobody will ever build on. A cemetery is about the safest address a tree can hold in a Dutch town: no redevelopment, no road widening, no new drains cut through the root plate, and a keeper whose job has always included the planting. This copper beech has had that arrangement at the entrance of Voorburg's Algemene Begraafplaats, on the Parkweg, for something like a century and a half. The national register dates the planting to somewhere between 1860 and 1870, so roughly 160 years, and says nothing about who chose it. The choice looks deliberate rather than accidental. A copper beech is dark, slow, heavy and effectively permanent, and this one was set at the gate, where it is the first thing anyone passes going in and the last thing on the way out. Beech does its ageing in girth rather than in its bark, which stays smooth and grey to the end. That makes a 160 year old beech easy to walk past and hard to walk past twice, because the scale only registers once you are close enough to think about getting your arms around it. The ground is open daily and it is a working cemetery, so keep the visit quiet. Voorburg is part of Leidschendam-Voorburg, east of The Hague rather than in it.