The Copper Beech of Hieronymusplantsoen

Utrecht's own tree register cannot agree with itself about this copper beech. One entry, filed for the national Bomenstichting listing, dates its planting to the 1880s. The municipality's own separate file says something older, that it was planted along with the rest of Hieronymusplantsoen by the landscape architect J.D. Zocher in 1835, part of the decades-long project that turned Utrecht's old medieval walls and moat into the ring of parks still circling the historic centre today. Both cannot be right, and nobody has settled which, so this page states both rather than picking the more flattering one. Either way it has stood on this small rise in the plantsoen for well over a century, its purple-red leaves a deliberate accent against the plane and elm green Zocher planted around it. Copper beech is not a distinct species but a colour form of the ordinary beech, propagated by grafting, because a beech grown from its own seed reverts to green more often than not, which makes every specimen a small act of continued human intervention rather than a wild event. It grows on open parkland in front of the building known locally as the Vrije School, no fence and no ticket. If a photograph or a planting record settles which date is right, tell us.