The Silver Maple of Sumatraplein

Most of Nijmegen's protected trees carry the register's full monumental status. This one carries a lower rank, 'potentieel', a candidate rather than a confirmed monument, which changes nothing about standing in front of it: a silver maple on a residential street in Nijmegen-Oost, somewhere past its first century. Acer saccharinum grows fast and splits easily, which is why American cities stopped planting it as a street tree decades before European ones did; the trees that survive from an early planting wave tend to be the ones nobody got around to replacing. This one has made it that far on a municipal verge, owned and maintained by the city rather than a private garden, which is also why it can carry a public register entry at all. Two city records disagree on when it went in: the national monumental tree register puts it at 1900 to 1910, the municipality's own tree-management dataset says 1930. Neither is a measurement, and no girth has been recorded for this one, so treat any single number as an estimate. It stands in the open on Sumatraplein, free to see at any hour, about twenty minutes on foot from the station.