The Zasulauks Maple

In 1975 this maple measured four metres round. By 2009 it was 5.34, a third of its own waistline added inside thirty-four years. It is the thickest and widest spreading maple in Riga, and one of the largest in Latvia, though the Latvian tree databases cannot agree how large: one ranks it second in the country, another fourth. It rises 26 metres, forks into two stems at about two and a half metres up, and carries a crown over roughly 450 square metres, which is a great deal of shade for a species most people walk past without looking. Its age is given as about 140 years, a round figure from a survey rather than a count of rings. That ordinariness is the point. The Norway maple is the standard street tree of northern Europe, planted by the thousand and noticed by almost nobody, and this is what one looks like when it is left alone to reach full size. It grows beside a wooden tenement house on the former grounds of Zasumuiža manor, in what is now the Kalnciema Quarter, a district of restored timber buildings with a regular market. The address is written two ways, Kuldīgas iela 31/33 and Kalnciema iela 31/33, almost certainly the same corner building counted from two streets. The last published measurement is that 2009 one; nobody has put a tape around it since.