The Westerplatte French Maple

Krakow's newest protected tree is a maple from the Mediterranean, and the city asked its residents about it first. Acer monspessulanum grows wild on dry limestone slopes from Spain to the Caucasus and is almost never planted on a Central European street, where the maples are Norway and sycamore. This one stands on ul. Westerplatte, hard against the Planty, the ring of park laid out on the ground the medieval city walls once held. In September 2025 the city put five candidate trees out to public consultation: two beeches, an ash, an oak and this klon francuski. The consultation closed in early October, and the tree's entry in the national register of natural monuments is dated 6 June 2026, which makes it one of the most recently protected trees in the city. Nobody has published a measurement of it. The register gives a species, a coordinate and a date and stops there; the local reporting on the consultation named the tree and did not measure it either. So there is no girth here and no age. French maple leaves are small, leathery and three-lobed, a fraction of the size of the Norway maple leaves further along the same walk, and the species does not make a giant, so the case for the ten minutes from the Main Square is the rarity rather than the scale. If you pass it with a tape measure, send us the number.