The Old Silver Maple of the Botanical Garden

This silver maple is older than the garden it stands in. A guide who knows the Montreal Botanical Garden's trees wrote to us that it dates from around 1885, nearly half a century before Brother Marie-Victorin founded the garden in 1931. "It is the oldest silver maple at the Botanical Garden, unfortunately severely damaged since the photo was taken, but still viable." Silver maple is native to the riverbanks and floodplains of southern Quebec, a fast grower with soft wood, named for the pale undersides of its leaves, which flash white when the wind turns them. This one splits low into several great stems, and its bark has broken into long shaggy plates that curl away at the edges, as the photograph on this page shows. That photograph was taken before the damage the guide describes, so expect a more battered crown than the one you see here. It stands in the south-west part of the garden, east of the Alpine Garden and just north of the Useful Plants Garden. The garden charges admission. Nobody has published a measurement or a planting record for this tree yet, so its age is the guide's account rather than a ring count. If you know more about it, tell us.