The Silver Maple of the Castle Park

This tree is a fragment of something much larger that no longer exists. Kasteel Helmond has been standing in the middle of this town for nearly seven hundred years, a moated brick castle that is now the town hall and museum. Until the middle of the twentieth century it sat inside a big landscape park, the kind that a private owner maintains and a town cannot. In 1921 the last private owner sold the castle, and most of the park went in the decades that followed, built over or reorganised into something smaller. The silver maple, planted between 1890 and 1900, belongs to that vanished park. So do three other trees on this page. Together they are the best physical evidence of what used to be here. Silver maple is North American and was planted for speed and for its leaf, which is cut into five narrow lobes and is bright silver-white on the underside, so the crown flashes pale whenever there is wind. It does one more thing worth timing a visit for. It flowers in March, in small red and yellow tufts directly on the bare twigs, weeks before anything around it moves.