The Silver Maple of the Oosterpoortsgracht

A fungal infection is climbing this maple from the roots up. Inspectors recorded a substantial infection at the base and root collar in 2024, on a silver maple the municipality planted between 1900 and 1910 at the water's edge of the Oosterpoortsgracht, inside the Oosterplantsoen. It is still alive and still carries a full crown, and it sits on Hoorn's own signed tree route through the park, a few dozen metres from several of the city's other protected trees. The park itself is younger than its trees look. When Hoorn's city walls, gates and towers came down through the nineteenth century, the cleared ground became a walking park, and part of the old rampart still runs beneath the grass. This maple went into that new ground within its first decade. Nobody has measured its girth, and the municipal survey gives only the planting decade rather than a year. What it does say plainly is the one thing worth knowing before a visit: the tree is in decline. See it while it is still the tree the register calls fine.