The Liberation Beech of Servaasbolwerk

This copper beech was planted to be looked at and remembered, not simply grown. Bevrijdingsbomen, liberation trees, went into the ground across the Netherlands after May 1945 as living memorials to the country's liberation from German occupation, and the Dutch national monumental tree register marks this one at Servaasbolwerk with exactly that designation: a herdenkingsboom, a memorial tree, from the same decade as the liberation itself. Fagus sylvatica f. purpurea, the copper or purple beech, is a straightforward garden variety chosen for its colour rather than any rarity, dark reddish purple leaves through the growing season rather than the species' usual green. An independent record from 2015, a local history blog that photographed the tree and named it directly as a bevrijdingsbeuk, confirms both the species and the memorial purpose without giving an exact planting year, so the age here rests on the register's decade band rather than a specific date tied to the liberation itself. At around eighty years old it is the youngest tree on this list by some margin, a reminder planted deliberately rather than grown accidentally into significance, standing on the same historic bastion parkland as the older planes nearby. Free, public, in the heart of the old city.