The Norway Maple of Mondstraße
Its leaf stalks bleed white when they break. That milky sap is the one reliable way to tell a Norway maple from the sycamore maples it otherwise resembles, and it is the sort of trick worth knowing at a trunk where the leaves are twenty metres up. What you can see from the pavement is scale: Munich's 2021 natural monument ordinance calls it a very mighty, singular tree that defines the square it stands in, which is a lot of authority to hand one maple. The square is on Mondstrasse in Untergiesing, moon street, on the low ground by the Isar below the terrace that Giesing proper sits on. Giesing was a poor quarter of brickworkers and day labourers long before it was a fashionable one, and its street corners are small, hard and short of green. A tree that determines what one of them looks like is doing real work. Norway maple is the first of the big shade trees to flower here, in April, in acid yellow-green clusters that open before the leaves and are easy to mistake for early foliage from a distance. The register records no age, and no other source names this tree. If you have a date for it, send it over.
In bloomAutumn colour
October, when the crown turns clear butter yellow over the square
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Mondstraße, 81547 MünchenYou can recognise it by white sap bleeding from a snapped leaf stalk, the trick that tells it apart from a sycamore maple, and by a crown large enough to define the whole square. It stands on Mondstraße, Untergiesing.
Free, public land, no restrictions
In Untergiesing-Harlaching, on Mondstraße
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: Naturdenkmal (Bayern LfU), no. ND-02000
- Munich Naturdenkmalverordnung 2021, Untergiesing-Harlaching 1
- lfu.bayern.de
