The Maple of the Nieuw-Vennep Church

The sap of a Norway maple is milky white. That one fact separates it from the sycamore it otherwise closely resembles, and it means a broken twig on this tree bleeds like a dandelion stem instead of running clear. It grows in the grounds of the Hervormde church on the Hoofdweg in Nieuw-Vennep, a village that exists at all because the Haarlemmermeer was pumped dry in 1852 and somebody then had to farm the lake bed. The register puts the maple's planting between 1930 and 1940, so it is about ninety years old, and it has spent every one of those years on ground nobody has ever had a reason to dig up. Norway maple is the tree that gets the Dutch spring started. It flowers in April, before its own leaves are out, in dense clusters of a sharp yellow-green that read from a hundred metres off and can fool you into thinking the crown has leafed a month early. Bees work them hard, because almost nothing else is open yet. The leaves that follow are broad and thin with long drawn-out points, and by late October they turn clear yellow. Churchyards are where old trees tend to survive, for the plain reason that nobody redevelops one. Nobody recorded who planted this maple, and the national register is the only source that describes it. If you know, tell us.