A sycamore is the most ordinary large tree in northern Europe, which makes it worth asking why this one sits on the national register for dendrological reasons rather than for history or memorial v...
Sycamore
Nobody plants a sycamore on purpose any more. This page maps every sycamore on the site, 16 so far across 15 cities.
It seeds itself into gutters, railway banks and any gap it can find across northern Europe, grows fast, and gets cut down long before it becomes anything, which is precisely what makes an old one worth looking up at. Glasgow's Darnley Sycamore is put at 450 to 500 years, exceptional for a species that rarely passes 400, and it carries the name of Mary, Queen of Scots' husband on a story from 1565. Copenhagen's is the thickest tree inside Assistens cemetery and the least exotic species in it. Edinburgh's grows sideways out of solid rock at the start of a riverside walkway, with no recorded age and no need of one. Eight are mapped, one in each of eight cities, from Reykjavik down to Barcelona, where the summers are hot enough that the species barely holds on.
Amsterdam
Barcelona
Thirty metres of tree on a trunk 1.38 metres round.
Copenhagen
The thickest tree at Assistens is also the least exotic species in it.
Brussels
Nobody plants a sycamore on purpose any more.
Nijmegen
Nijmegen's most recent Tree of the Year grows on ground that has been fought over since the Romans.
Dublin
Photo: Wendy Cutler (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The oldest tree on the Farmleigh estate predates the Guinness family who made the place famous by about a century.
Krakow
The city's register carries this maple under two numbers, 204 centimetres and 191, because it has two trunks rather than one.
Edinburgh
At the start of the River Almond Walkway in Cramond, a sycamore grows sideways out of solid rock instead of up from soil, its roots gripping a ledge on the riverbank and its trunk reaching out over...
The Corstorphine SycamoreYoung replacement
The tree standing in Corstorphine Kirk's churchyard today is not the tree its story is about.
Groningen
This sycamore grows on a square named for a man most Dutch schoolchildren have never heard of, Henri Daniel Guyot, a Walloon minister who founded the country's first school for deaf children in Gro...
Reykjavik
In 1918, the year the Act of Union made Iceland a sovereign state in union with Denmark, a sycamore maple went into the ground at the corner of Suðurgata and Vonarstræti, on a small patch of grass...
Munich
A mountain tree ended up on a flat city street and outgrew everything on it.
Glasgow
For an oak or a yew, 450 years would be middle age.
Bucaco
Every other tree on this page keeps its colour year round, evergreens collected from Australia, Mexico, California and Portugal's own hillsides behind one wall.
Oss
This sycamore in Megen was planted in 1928, one of the few trees on this list whose year the register states outright rather than banding into a decade.
Sittard-Geleen
This sycamore maple grows on Janskamperstraat in Geleen, banded by the national register to a planting around 1910, roughly 120 years old.
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