The Copper Beech North of the Vreugd en Rust Koepel

The register gives this tree no street address. It files it as the copper beech on the north side of koepel number one, which tells you what sort of park you are walking into. Vreugd en Rust is an old country estate turned public ground, joy and rest in Dutch, and a koepel is one of its domed garden houses. Two copper beeches were planted at that pavilion somewhere between 1830 and 1840, one north of it and one south, and entered separately in the national monumental tree register. The southern one was cut back in 2014 and only a memorial trunk remains; this is the one still standing. That puts them at roughly 190 years, from an estimate rather than a count of rings, and they are close enough in age and bulk that on paper the compass point is the only thing separating them. This is the northern one. Purple beech leaves are at their oddest in May. They open thin enough for the light to pass through, so the whole crown burns translucent red for a fortnight before the pigment thickens and the tree settles into something closer to black by August. Anyone who has only seen a copper beech in high summer has seen the dull half of it. The park is in Voorburg, in the municipality of Leidschendam-Voorburg, which is a trip out from The Hague rather than a corner of it.