The Silver Maple of Park Zaslawa Malickiego

The thickest of this park's three protected trees is also the shortest. The silver maple on the western shore of Staw Rakowiecki measures 502 centimetres round and stops at 17.5 metres, where the white poplar 150 metres away is four centimetres slimmer and nearly twice as tall. That squat build is what a maple does with room to spare: grown in the open with nothing crowding it, it spends on width and on heavy low limbs instead of racing anything for light. Silver maple is a North American tree, planted across European parks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for exactly this habit of getting large fast beside water. Its leaves are cut almost to the midrib into five sharp lobes and are pale, close to white, on the underside, so a breeze off the pond turns the whole crown two colours at once. Warsaw protected it on 22 September 2016, the last of the three designations here to be signed: the poplar in 1987, the wych elm in 2012, then this one. Three protected trees, one pond, one playground, about 150 metres of walking between the lot of them. Nobody has dated it. If you know when this pond bank was planted, tell us.