The Elm of the Munnikenbolwerk

Any old elm in the Netherlands is a survivor, and this one has had about a century and a half of chances to die. Dutch elm disease is named after the Dutch scientists who identified the fungus in the 1920s, not after the country's elms, though those suffered as badly as any. The first wave killed a great many trees between the wars. The second strain, far more aggressive, arrived in the 1970s and took most of what was left, emptying avenues across the whole country in a decade. It spreads through bark beetles and through root grafts between neighbouring trees, which is why lines of elms died in sequence and isolated ones sometimes did not. Standing alone on a bastion behind a cultural centre is, in that light, a good address. It was planted between 1880 and 1890 on the Munnikenbolwerk, one of the 1565 works that Zocher turned into park in 1870. The leaf tells you: distinctly lopsided at the base, one side starting lower on the stalk than the other. And elms come into leaf late and hold on late, so this is often the last green thing on the bastion in November.