The Four-Trunked Silver Maple of Cecilio Rodriguez

This maple gave up on having one trunk early. It divides at about head height into four main stems, each carrying its share of a crown 15 metres across and 20 metres tall, a form silver maples fall into readily and gardeners usually correct. Nobody corrected this one. It stands inside the Jardines de Cecilio Rodriguez, the walled Andalusian-style garden in the south-east corner of the Retiro, laid out in the 1940s on ground first set aside in 1929 for an extension to the park's zoo. The peacocks that patrol the hedges are what came of that plan instead. Acer saccharinum is North American, a tree of the river bottoms of the eastern United States, and it takes its name from the underside of the leaf rather than from sap: turn one over and it is pale silver white, so a breeze through the crown changes the colour of the entire tree at once. It flowers before it leafs, in tight red clusters in late February, weeks before anything else in the park has woken up. The garden shuts at dusk and is one of the quietest corners of the Retiro, which for a park this busy is worth knowing about.