The Copper Beech of the Servaasbolwerk

This stretch of canal has a beech problem, and it is worth saying out loud before you go looking. Within a few hundred metres the register holds another purple beech near Zonnenburg with a four metre trunk, a third by the Wittevrouwenbrug measuring 430 centimetres and rotting from the inside with giant polypore, and the liberation beech planted after 1945. None of those measurements belong to this tree. It is register number 1688712 and it carries no girth and no height of its own. What identifies it is what it looks at. It stands on the Servaasbolwerk facing the Leeuwenberghkerk, the small church put up in the 1560s as a plague house by a city that expected to need one. The register dates the tree's planting to between 1890 and 1900, roughly 126 to 136 years, so it is a good half century older than the liberation beech down the path. One gap we cannot close from the paperwork. The register records the genus and stops. Purple leaf in a beech is a mutation that turns up both as a nursery variety and by accident, and nothing on file says whether this specimen is genuinely copper-leaved. Go in May, when the new leaves are at their most translucent, and tell us what colour it actually is.