The Maple of the Memorial Beech

This tree's address is another tree. The national register of monumental trees gives it no house number and no street: it is filed as the one standing just south of the memorial beech on Zonnenburg, which is what happens to a large maple in a park where the neighbours have better stories. Zonnenburg is a bastion of Utrecht's medieval defensive wall. From 1835 the landscape architect Jan David Zocher jr turned that whole ring of fortifications into the Singelplantsoen, the chain of parks along the canal that the city still walks through, and the old observatory sits on this same piece of raised ground. The register dates the maple's planting to between 1880 and 1890, so roughly 136 to 146 years, a couple of generations later than the park it stands in. Which maple it is, we cannot tell you. The register calls it a gewone esdoorn, a Dutch name that gets used for the sycamore and for the Norway maple both, and nobody has settled it for this specimen. The seeds decide it and you can do it from the path: sycamore carries its winged pairs hanging at roughly a right angle, Norway maple spreads them almost flat, in a straight line. Look up, then tell us which one is up there.