The Field Maple of Kaerholmen

Copenhagen has two field maples large enough for the national tree register, and this is the one nobody writes about. The register lists it plainly as Navr 2, the second of the city's two, surveyed in November 2019 and recorded as living and healthy: 3.60 metres round, 15.5 metres tall, standing on its own on the grass of Grondalsparken opposite the building at Kaerholmen. It does not hold that girth in a column. The register's field notes describe a tree that breaks into several stems from about a metre up, so what you walk toward is a heavy low fork rather than a clean trunk, with the whole crown carried on the limbs coming out of it. Acer campestre is worth knowing by its details, because nothing about it is showy. The leaves are small and five-lobed with blunt tips, and the young twigs grow corky ridges along their length, which is a field maple habit and nothing else's. It is a species usually met as a clipped hedge; left alone long enough it makes a solid round-headed tree, and this is one of the few around here that got the chance. No source outside the register carries it, and nobody has dated it. If you know when it went in, tell us.