The Wertheimpark Sycamore

A sycamore is the most ordinary large tree in northern Europe, which makes it worth asking why this one sits on the national register for dendrological reasons rather than for history or memorial value. The register does not say. Under history it writes: unknown. Somebody with a measuring tape decided this specimen was exceptional enough to protect and left it at that. It stands behind the monument to Abraham Carel Wertheim, the banker and philanthropist the park was named after in 1898, a year after his death. The tree went in between 1910 and 1920, so it is around 110 years old and has spent every year of it a few metres behind that monument. Acer pseudoplatanus is a maple that acquired the English name sycamore, which it shares with an unrelated American plane, and the confusion has never been cleared up. It seeds itself into every gap in every European city, grows anywhere, and if nothing interferes it can pass four hundred years, which makes 110 barely adulthood. The species is so common that a good specimen tends to be overlooked, which is roughly what happened here until the register caught up with it. Free, in a park of three quarters of a hectare holding around fifteen trees over a century old. Go and see whether you can work out what the surveyor saw.