The Bosnian Maple of Gendarmenmarkt

Berlin did not protect this maple for one reason. It gave four. When it became Naturdenkmal 1-102/B-2 on 2 March 1993, the register cited its character, its beauty, its rarity and local-history grounds, all at once. The register calls it Bosnischer Ahorn, the Bosnian maple, and it is a form of the Italian maple from the mountains of southern Europe and the Balkans, not a tree you expect on one of the most visited squares in Berlin. It stands on the Gendarmenmarkt at the Charlottenstrasse corner, south-west of the Deutscher Dom. It does not stand alone, and that matters if you come to find it. About 14 metres away is a Norway maple, registered beside it as 1-102/B-1, and from a distance the two read as a pair of ordinary maples. Up close they part ways. The Norway maple has broad leaves whose lobes end in fine sharp points. The Italian maple's leaves are smaller, with shallow, blunt, rounded lobes, which is what its subspecies name, obtusatum, means. Look at a leaf before you look at the trunk. About 50 metres north is a third protected tree on the same square, a Japanese pagoda tree. Nobody has published an age or a girth for this maple; Berlin's register records neither. If you know when it was planted, tell us.