The Japanese Maple of Waldeckpark

The national register puts this Japanese maple in the planting years 1910 to 1920. The park around it was laid out in 1921. Both statements come from good sources and nobody has reconciled them: either the maple was already standing on the old Bastion Waldeck before Leonard Springer drew his park over the demolished fortification, or the register's decade band is simply loose. Worth knowing, and not yet written down anywhere. What the band does give is a bracket of roughly 106 to 116 years, which is a long life for Acer palmatum. The species is a slow, small tree, planted across Europe since the nineteenth century as a garden ornament and rarely allowed to get old; most of the Japanese maples anyone has met are shrubs you can see over the top of. This one has had a century in municipal ground, which is why the register marks it as dendrologically notable rather than merely present. It is also, so far, a tree only one source names. Waldeckpark and the Stadspark it adjoins hold more than 800 trees between them across some 160 species, and the histories of the park describe that collection without singling this specimen out. It stands with the park's Caucasian wingnut, golden rain tree and sweet gum, four trees in a few minutes of walking.