The Silver Maple by the Oude Dieze

Silver maple is a nursery tree, planted for speed rather than for length of life. It grows fast, splits at the fork in a storm and is usually gone before it turns a hundred. This one is on the municipal monument list at roughly 110 years, 25 metres tall, with a trunk close to four metres round, standing along the Oude Dieze where the old inner-city water runs through the Casinotuin. The species comes from the river bottoms of the eastern United States, and a canal bank in Den Bosch is about as close as a Dutch park gets to that. The leaves give it away: deeply cut, pale and nearly white underneath, so the whole crown turns over silver whenever a wind comes up the water. No other maple of its species grows within sight, so there is nothing here to confuse it with; the purple-leaved copper beech about 40 metres away across the same stretch of park is a different tree altogether. Vitality reads as reduced, and the register is the only source that names this individual tree, the 1996 survey of the city's old trees having named maples in this quarter without identifying which. Bastion Oranje and its pair of Norway maples are about six minutes west.