The Variegated Maple of the Huis van Gijn Garden

This is the tree in the Huis van Gijn garden you can see without buying a ticket. The national register goes out of its way to record that the trunk and crown show from the Hoge Nieuwstraat, the street running along the back of the garden wall. What the register will not tell you is exactly what it is. The entry says only bonte esdoorn, a variegated maple, with no Latin name attached. The marked leaves point at a variegated form of sycamore maple, and that is as far as the evidence goes; nobody has written down the cultivar. If you can name it, tell us and we will correct the page. Its age is unsettled in the same way as the plane standing near it. The register gives a planting band of 1880 to 1890. The museum's own garden page groups the maple with that plane and says both were probably planted around 1840. That is a spread of roughly 136 to 186 years, and neither source shows its working. The register is more confident about the state of it: three metres round, condition good, a fine trunk and a well-developed crown, growing at the edge of the garden along the wall. Under either date it was already here while the Van Gijn family still lived in the house.