The Field Maple of Parque Bensaúde

A field maple with a 3.5 metre waist is an oddity. This is the modest one of the European maples, a hedgerow and woodland-edge tree that usually tops out around 15 metres and rarely gets thick, and this one has a trunk wider than either of the classified holm oaks standing a few dozen metres east of it. It reaches 13.5 metres at the western end of Parque Bensaúde, the fourth of the four trees the state singled out here in 2004. No age is recorded for it. Field maples are hard to date without cutting into them and this one has never been surveyed for age, so the honest answer is that it is old enough to have grown far beyond the usual size, and no more precise than that. Look at the leaves to be sure you have the right tree. Field maple carries small five-lobed leaves with blunt rounded tips, quite unlike the sharp-pointed maples of parks and streets, and older twigs often develop corky ridges you can feel with a thumb. In autumn it turns clear yellow, briefly, before Lisbon's mild weather takes the leaves off. The park was the Quinta de Santo António das Frechas, a 17th century estate, which explains how a northern European maple got here at all. Somebody planted it in a private garden and let it get on with it.