The Norway Maple of Mondstraße

Snap a leaf stalk off this tree and it bleeds white. 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.