This silver maple's trunk is 4.27 metres round, and in October 2023 the Forest Preserves of Cook County measured it as the second-biggest silver maple on all their land.
Silver Maple
Acer saccharinum
Silver maple grows fast, splits easily in a storm, and is usually gone before it turns a hundred, which makes every old one on this list an exception to its own species. We map 16 of them, in 12 cities.
Acer saccharinum comes from the flooded river bottoms of eastern North America, where it is built to take a spring deluge that would kill less flexible trees. Montreal's McKenna maple was an ornamental on a florist's grounds before Notre-Dame-des-Neiges laid out its burial sections around the trunk; it is 5.8 metres round and about 150 years old. In Madrid's walled Cecilio Rodriguez garden one gave up on a single trunk early and grew four. Hoorn's by the Veliusbrug is the survivor of a pair. Warsaw declared one on Jazdów a protected tree four months after an expressway opened thirty metres away. Bruges planted its Canada Tree in 1947, possibly the wrong maple for the flag.
Chicago
Madrid
This maple gave up on having one trunk early.
Photo: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Montreal
This tree was here before the cemetery was.
Warsaw
The thickest of this park's three protected trees is also the shortest.
Polish law protects an American tree here.
An expressway opened 30 metres from this maple in July 1974.
Poznan
This is not a Polish tree.
Nijmegen
Most of Nijmegen's protected trees carry the register's full monumental status.
Tilburg
This park was dug by unemployed men.
Dordrecht
It was standing in a field for half a century before anyone made a park around it.
Den Bosch
Silver maple is a nursery tree, planted for speed rather than for length of life.
Helmond
The register thinks this tree is as old as the ground it stands on, and it hedges the claim rather than making it.
This tree is a fragment of something much larger that no longer exists.
Bruges
This tree was planted for a flag, and it may be the wrong species for the flag.
Hoorn
There were two of these by the Veliusbrug and now there is one.
A fungal infection is climbing this maple from the roots up.
Explore by city: Chicago · Madrid · Montreal · Warsaw · Nijmegen · Tilburg · Dordrecht · Den Bosch · Helmond · Bruges · Hoorn · every city · or browse all species.