The Silver Maple of Wołoska

Polish law protects an American tree here. Acer saccharinum grows wild in the river bottoms of eastern North America and came to European cities for its speed and for its leaves, cut nearly to the midrib and silver-white underneath, which lift and flicker in any breeze. Warsaw signed this one into the register of natural monuments on 4 January 2022, one of the newest protected trees in the city. It stands 20 metres tall on a trunk 339 centimetres round, 108 centimetres through. We have given it no age. Silver maple is among the fastest growing maples there is and its rate swings with how wet its feet are, so converting that girth into years would describe the formula rather than the tree. Nobody has written its history down either, which is what usually happens to a tree standing at a street number rather than in a park. No legend, no dated planting, no plaque we know of. What it has instead is size, in a species that normally gets felled for brittleness long before it reaches this, and a legal designation that arrived decades after the tree did. One honest warning. The address is ul. Woloska 139 in Mokotow, and we have not confirmed whether you can walk up to the trunk or only see it from the pavement. If you get there first, tell us which it is.