The Great Maple of Assistens

The thickest tree at Assistens is also the least exotic species in it. At 4.19 metres round, this sycamore out-measures every tree the Danish Dendrological Society registered inside these walls, including the rarities people actually come to see, and it does it as a common European maple that seeds itself into any gap it can find. Twenty-two and a half metres tall, one trunk to about two metres up and then a fork into two, alive and healthy at the November 2019 survey, rated regionally noteworthy. Assistens was not built for strolling. It opened in 1757 outside the city ramparts as an overflow burial ground, taking the dead that Copenhagen's crowded parish churchyards could no longer hold, and the famous names arrived later. The city then grew out past it, Nørrebro packed in around it, and the place slowly turned into what it is now: a walled park with graves in it, where on a warm afternoon the living comfortably outnumber the mourners. No planting date exists for this maple, and the 100 to 180 years given here is inferred from its girth rather than counted. What is certain is the measurement, taken with GPS in the field, and that nothing else registered in this cemetery is thicker. Section C, a little southwest of the section's centre.