The Wilson Paperbark Maple

Almost every paperbark maple in America descends from two seedlings one man dug out of a Chinese wood in the autumn of 1907. The plant collector Ernest Henry Wilson found them in forest north of Yichang, in Hubei, lifted them and shipped them to the Arnold Arboretum. Both survived. This is one of the two, accession 12488, and by the Arboretum's record the pair are the first and the oldest paperbark maples on the continent and the genetic source of most of the ones planted in the country since. The species has gone the other way at home. Acer griseum is now endangered in the wild in China, its remaining stands small and scattered, which makes a specimen tree in Jamaica Plain a piece of conservation as much as a piece of horticulture. Come in winter. The bark is what the tree is named for and it is the reason to make the walk: it lifts off the trunk in thin cinnamon and copper curls that stay attached rather than falling, and with the leaves gone and low sun on it the trunk is the whole show. One note on the record. All of the above traces back to the Arboretum, including a published feature written out of its own history, so this is one institution's account, thorough and public, but not independently corroborated. No coordinates exist for the individual tree. The pin is the maple collection off Meadow Road, about ten minutes up from the Forest Hills gate.