The Copper Beech of the Zuiddijk Cemetery

This tree's own file cannot agree with itself about its age. The register's planting band puts it in the 1880s, while the note underneath says the cemetery dates from the early twentieth century and that the copper beech was planted when the cemetery was. Nobody has reconciled the two, so the age here is a range rather than a date, and the later reading would make it younger still. What is not in doubt is that it was planted as one of a set. The register reckons there were once several copper beeches along the avenues of this burial ground, and five of them still stand further east, listed under a number of their own. This one has the middle of the ground to itself. A copper beech is a colour mutation of the ordinary green beech. The purple pigment masks the chlorophyll underneath, so the dark form grows a shade less vigorously than a green one and rarely wins a fight in a wood. Nurseries propagate the good ones by grafting, because seedlings are a lottery. Which is to say that almost every large copper beech you meet is somewhere a person decided to put one, and a cemetery avenue was exactly that kind of decision. You will find it in the middle of the burial ground off the Zuiddijk in Zaandam, open in daylight. Only the national register describes this tree.