The Leopold Maple of Wertheimpark

The point of this tree happens in April. Acer platanoides 'Leopoldii' opens its new leaves pink and white, streaked and splashed as though someone had flicked paint at them, before they settle into a mottled green for the summer. The cultivar came out of Louis van Houtte's nursery in Ghent in the middle of the nineteenth century, one of a wave of variegated garden forms the Belgian trade sold across Europe, and it is why a fairly ordinary sized maple ended up on Amsterdam's register of special trees. Ordinary is the right word for the rest of it. The register gives a planting year of 1920 and a girth of 262 centimetres, which for a Norway maple of that age is unremarkable, and the register is also the only document anywhere that names this individual tree. Everything else known about it is known about the cultivar in general. What it has is position. It stands along the water in Wertheimpark with an Oriental plane eighteen metres away and two Caucasian wingnuts beside them, in a park of three quarters of a hectare holding around fifteen trees over a century old, with Artis on one side and the Hortus a few minutes down the road. Come in late April and it is the one in the group visibly doing something.