The Sycamore Maple of Hirschpark

This maple was the sixth tree in Germany to be made a national heritage tree, and the first in Hamburg. The Deutsche Dendrologische Gesellschaft gave it that status on 23 October 2020, six years before the pagoda tree on the Alsterufer became the city's second. What earns it is the shape. The crown domes down almost to the ground on every side, roughly 35 metres across, so the tree finishes as a wall of leaf rather than tapering into open trunk the way a park specimen usually does. It is 22 metres tall with 5.50 metres of girth measured at the waist in 2020, which is large for a sycamore maple and still the slimmest trunk on this page. The shape is what people come for. It stands in Hirschpark, a free public landscape park on the Elbe at Nienstedten, south of the Lindenallee. Jenischpark and its two old oaks are about 3 km east along the Elbchaussee, which makes a long riverside walk rather than a single afternoon's stroll. No planting record survives; the estimate from the trunk gives roughly 200 to 270 years.