The Copper Beech of Langiewicza

A copper beech is an accident somebody kept. The purple leaf is a mutation that turns up now and then in ordinary green beech woods, and the copper beeches of European gardens descend from a handful of those chance trees, propagated by gardeners who liked the colour. This one has been under legal protection in Warsaw since 23 April 1974, more than fifty years. It stands 26 metres tall on a trunk 320 centimetres round, and the city's own records carry the same two measurements as the national register, so the figures have been taken twice. Nobody wrote down when it was planted. At a diameter near 102 centimetres, beech of this size usually works out somewhere between 100 and 160 years, which is a band rather than a date and stays one here. Even at the young end of that band the tree was standing in August 1944, when Ochota was fought over, burnt and emptied of its people. The district was rebuilt around whatever survived, and ul. Langiewicza is one of the quiet streets that came out of that rebuilding. The beech predates the street as it now looks. Go in May. The new leaves open a deep translucent red before they harden and darken toward the bronze they hold all summer, and a beech of this height in fresh leaf is worth planning a walk around.