The Bednarski Park Sycamore Maple

The city's register carries this maple under two numbers, 204 centimetres and 191, because it has two trunks rather than one. That is the register being careful, and it is also the easiest way to find the tree: among the maples on this slope, look for the one going up as a pair. Sycamore is a mountain species, the maple of the Carpathians and the Alps, and it makes timber size on thin stony ground where most broadleaves give up. Park Bednarskiego, cut into a limestone quarry above Podgorze and planted from the 1890s, is that kind of ground. Three maple species grow here and this is the klon jawor, the one whose bark flakes off in plates as it ages, leaving the trunk mottled like a plane tree. It was protected in February 2017, one of four trees in this single garden that Krakow put on the natural monument register in one council resolution, alongside a black walnut, a European larch and an ash. Four monuments inside one park, which is why this hillside is worth an afternoon rather than a detour. Nobody has dated it, and no source says whether it was planted here or seeded itself, which sycamore does readily. If you know more about this one, tell us.