The Copper Beech by the Fountain

A dark tree next to moving water was somebody's decision. This is a designed pairing and it still works: a copper beech placed to the left of a fountain on a square at the end of the Wilhelminasingel, planted between 1860 and 1870, when the ring of parks on the old fortifications was being finished and the city was arranging its new edges to be looked at. Purple foliage was a strong colour to have available. Copper beech is a mutation of the common beech, propagated by grafting rather than seed, and in a nineteenth century planting scheme it functioned as the darkest tone on the palette, the thing you put where the composition needed something heavy. Against pale water and spray it does exactly what was intended. A hundred and sixty years later it is also just a very large tree in the middle of a city, which is worth going to stand under. The canopy on a mature one is dense enough that the ground beneath stays dry in light rain. In the last week of October it turns from purple to a deep burnt copper and the square changes colour with it.