To make the city centre more liveable for residents and more welcoming for visitors, Budapest has invested in greener public space. As the city grows denser and its summers grow hotter, street trees earn their place: a mature canopy shades hot pavements and cools the air around it, while the leaves catch dust and traffic pollution before it reaches people.

Between 2019 and 2023, Van den Berk Nurseries supplied around 120 trees for this programme, most of them grown to a stem girth of 25 to 30 centimetres. At that size the trees made an immediate difference, giving the streets full crowns and real structure from the very first season.

Most of them were climate-tolerant field maples, mainly Acer campestre 'Elsrijk' and Acer campestre 'Lienco'. Field maple is native to Hungary and well suited to hard city conditions. Its roots tolerate being paved over, and it stands up to the de-icing salt and drought that wear down more delicate street trees. 'Elsrijk' carries a dense, compact crown that works well in narrow streets, and both selections flower for bees and butterflies and turn yellow in autumn. Alongside the maples came other robust urban species, including Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica), Mongolian lime (Tilia mongolica 'Buda') and Caucasian wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia), spreading the planting across several species so the streets stay green even if one runs into trouble.

These future-proof trees now line some of Budapest's most visited streets, making the centre cooler, cleaner and more pleasant to walk through, and they will keep doing that for decades as they grow.