The Copper Beech East of the Arentsburg Pond

A copper beech is an ordinary beech with a fault in it. The purple comes from a mutation that floods the leaf with red pigment until the green underneath stops showing, and because the fault only sometimes passes to the seedlings, nurserymen have spent two centuries grafting it onto ordinary beech roots instead. Nineteenth century estate owners bought the result by the thousand, which is how a tree that began as an accident in a wild wood ended up standing over a pond in Voorburg. This one holds the east bank in Park Arentsburg. The national register puts its planting between 1830 and 1840, so call it about 190 years, and note that this is a planting estimate rather than a count of rings. Nobody has taken a core from it. The band is what the record will carry. A second copper beech of much the same vintage stands across the water on the west side, so settle which bank you are on before you argue about which tree you are looking at. Beech keeps smooth grey bark for its whole life, so neither of them shows age in the way an oak does; it goes into girth instead. Park Arentsburg lies in Leidschendam-Voorburg, east of The Hague rather than in it, on the ground where the Roman town of Forum Hadriani once stood.