In fruit
Nobody plants a sycamore on purpose any more.
Sycamore
Acer pseudoplatanus
Nobody plants a sycamore on purpose any more. We map 21 of them, in 19 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. On the village green at Tolpuddle in Dorset, six farm labourers met under a sycamore in 1833 to form a union and were transported to Australia for it; the tree is about 340 years old and 6.06 metres round. 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.
Brussels
Munich
In fruit
A mountain tree ended up on a flat city street and outgrew everything on it.
Barcelona
In fruit
Thirty metres of tree on a trunk 1.38 metres round.
Dublin
In fruit
The oldest tree on the Farmleigh estate predates the Guinness family who made the place famous by about a century.
Photo: Wendy Cutler (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Krakow
In fruit
The city's register carries this maple under two numbers, 204 centimetres and 191, because it has two trunks rather than one.
Glasgow
In fruit
For an oak or a yew, 450 years would be middle age.
Reykjavik
In fruit
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...
Edinburgh
In fruit
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.
Copenhagen
In fruit
The thickest tree at Assistens is also the least exotic species in it.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Utrecht
In fruit
This tree's address is another tree.
Nijmegen
In fruit
Nijmegen's most recent Tree of the Year grows on ground that has been fought over since the Romans.
Salzburg
The protection on this sycamore does not stop at the bark.
Photo: Flanierer (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Deventer
In fruit
One of the thickest maples in the Netherlands has two trunks instead of one.
Bucaco
Autumn colour
Most trees on this page keep their colour year round, evergreens collected from Australia, Mexico, California and Portugal's own hillsides behind one wall.
Ramsau am Dachstein
In fruit
The only age anyone puts on this maple comes from a sign standing next to it, and the sign hedges: presumably around 450 years.
Photo: SchiDD (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Hamburg
In fruit
This maple was the sixth tree in Germany to be made a national heritage tree, and the first in Hamburg.
Luxembourg City
In fruit
Somebody has photographed this sycamore and nobody has measured it.
In fruit
This is the only tree here you get to by lift.
Spokane
In fruit
Spokane's Heritage Tree Register calls this sycamore maple a candidate for the state size record: 56 feet tall, plain green leaves, standing in Chief Garry Park on its own, away from any of this pa...
Tolpuddle
In fruit
The British trade union movement has a birthplace with a postcode, and it is a sycamore on a village green in Dorset.
Photo: Mike Faherty (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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