The Silver Maples of the Andrea Monument

There are two of them, and they flower before winter has finished. Silver maples open small red and green tufts in February or March, weeks ahead of their own leaves and ahead of almost everything else in the park, then spend the rest of the year growing faster than a maple ought to. The pair stands just west of the monument to burgemeester F. Andrea in Wilhelminapark, close enough together that the register holds them as a single entry of two trees, and close enough that a visitor sees one stop rather than two. Their planting band is 1880 to 1890, which puts them at roughly 136 to 146 years apiece. The name is about the leaf. Green on top, silver-white underneath, cut so deeply that the crown reads as light and slightly shredded, and when wind gets under it the whole tree goes pale at once. That colour change is the old rural sign that rain is on its way. The species is North American, and its speed costs it: silver maple wood is brittle and sheds limbs in storms more readily than most, which is why city tree registers watch them. Our record keeps them at genus level. The register's Dutch entry reads zilveresdoorn, silver maple, but nobody has confirmed the two in the field. One glance at a leaf underside would settle it, and we would take that answer.