The Kosciuszki Norway Maple

Norway maple is the tree Krakow plants when it simply needs a tree. It lines streets all over the city, which is what makes a protected one strange: in 2020 the council entered this specimen at ul. Kosciuszki 18 on the register of natural monuments, at 210 centimetres round. The girth is the whole case. Street maples are pruned back, hemmed in under paving and usually replaced long before they thicken, so a trunk over two metres round on an open pavement is not what the species normally manages in a city. It is also the second monument on this stretch of road. The Kosciuszki Silver Lime, twice as thick at 424 centimetres, stands about 115 metres along the same street, so the two are one short walk rather than two separate trips. April is the moment worth turning up for. Norway maple flowers before it leafs, and the bare crown fills with clusters of acid yellow-green that read, on a grey Krakow street, as the first colour of the year. A broken leaf stalk bleeds milky white, which is how the species is told from the sycamore it otherwise resembles. No age is on record. The register is interested in the measurement rather than the year, and nobody has published a figure. If you know when this one went in, tell us.