The Paperbark Maple of Cylburn Arboretum

A paperbark maple sheds its own bark in curls of cinnamon and copper, thin as paper, and it keeps doing that in every season, which is the whole reason anyone plants one where people will walk past it in winter. Cylburn Arboretum's specimen stands a few steps from the Visitor Center, close enough to the Greenspring Avenue entrance that most visits pass within sight of it without meaning to. The arboretum's own trail map marks the spot as point A and names it a City Champion. A Baltimore Sun guest columnist, touring the grounds in November 2023, gave it a champion score of 91 points and singled out the same feature the map cannot show: bark peeling back in bright, exfoliating strips. An institution and a firsthand account, written months apart, naming the same tree at the same corner of the grounds. Neither source gives a single number. A champion score is calculated from circumference, height and crown spread together, and pulling one figure back out of the total would mean inventing what nobody measured directly, so this page carries none. Paperbark maple is naturally a slow, small tree, and holding the city title here says more about how rare the species still is in Baltimore than about size. Go in low winter light, when the bark catches it best.