The Copper Beech of Groot Wezenland

A fence went up beside this beech, and the tree has been taking it in ever since. The national register says so in its own note: growing space here is tight, and sections of fence have grown into the trunk. That is less dramatic than it sounds and more inevitable. A tree lays a new layer of wood over its entire surface every year and cannot step sideways, so anything left leaning against it long enough ends up inside it. Give a beech a hundred and forty years and it will swallow railings, chains and signs without noticing. The register puts the planting between 1880 and 1890, on private ground beside a housing complex just off the line of Zwolle's old canal ring. Copper beech was the strong colour of that period of Dutch planting, a mutation of the common beech that has to be grafted rather than grown from seed, and it went wherever a scheme needed its darkest tone. This one has held that job through two world wars and the rebuilding of the street around it. Zwolle's own 2015 list of special trees records it as well, surveyed by a different office entirely: rode beuk, monumental, privately owned. Two registers, one tree, no argument between them. What neither of them settles is how close a visitor can actually stand. If you have been, tell us.