The dark secret of my profession is that 90% of landscape architects knows very little about trees. This square was built ten years ago and I doubt those trees have grown more than an inch or two since then. Common beech has the scientific name Fagus sylvatica, "sylvatica" meaning "of the forest", meaning the complete opposite of a windy, barren granite hellscape. But beech trees are "iconic" of the south and the competition entry promised beech and won because of beech, so beech it is. They have a really shallow root system so the whole sub terrain of that plaza is an artificial vegetation bed kept together with pumice, charcoal and prayers that nobody drives a truck over it. The runoff has to be kept separate and not allowed to infiltrate the bed since the salting of the roads during the winter would kill the trees in a year. A real marvel of engineering, but the landscape architect should be ashamed.