Fagus sylvatica European beech

Fagus sylvatica leaves, fruit, seed. John Rawlings

Purple-leaved forms of European beech are encountered in the Stanford landscape and its environs almost to the exclusion of the green-leaved trees. The many cultivars help account for the popularity of Fagus sylvatica in U.S. horticulture, compared with the American beech, F. grandifolia, which has a reputation for being difficult in cultivation, though a fine stand of that species once grew on campus and was removed around 1970 due to construction.

The handsome oval leaves with wavy margins and conspicuous parallel side-veins, long pointed winter buds, and smooth, pale gray bark make European beech easy to recognize. Bristly fruit cases open to reveal sharply three-sided beechnuts.

Purple-leaved forms are called purple or copper beeches, their foliage varying considerably in color. A small ‘Purpurea’ from 2006 grows in an island on Lasuen Mall, just north of Braun Music Center. A trio of ‘Red Obelisk’ (‘Rohan Obelisk’), a narrow, purple-leaved cultivar, can be found along the northwest edge of Kingscote Gardens, and two similar ones are in the central dining courtyard of Florence Moore Hall. At 901 Mears Court stands ‘Purpurea Tricolor’, its purple leaves irregularly and broadly edged in vivid pink.

A dwarf weeping purple form, ‘Purpurea Pendula’, grew in a raised bed in the north courtyard of the Education Building until its removal during new landscaping in 2024. Another copper beech northwest of the intersection of Galvez and Escondido malls was removed in 2017.

Larger copper beeches can be seen in Palo Alto, for example at the Art Center, 1313 Newell Road, near the Green Room entrance, and on the right at 3756 Cass Way. The local spectacle, however, is at Filoli in Woodside, where a formidable hedge of some 20 copper beeches near the knot garden has been clipped into a great wall of purple foliage, pierced by two doorways. The dead leaves persist through winter. Across the wall to the north, full-sized beeches can be seen.

Beech and Latin fagus are cognates, while sylvatica means simply “of the woods.”

Young copper beech near Braun Music Center. John Rawlings, Jun 2006