The Plume Elm of Molenbuurt

The national register files this tree in the bucket marked ordinary Dutch elm. The heading on its own entry in that same register says Pluimiep, plume elm, which is not the same thing at all. The city's 2017 list of monumental trees settles the question by being specific: Ulmus glabra 'Exoniensis', the Exeter Elm, a cultivar of wych elm that grows narrow and upright with a crowded, congested crown instead of the wide vase most elms make. The Dutch name is a description of that shape. Both lists give the same address and the same planting decade, 1890 to 1900, so this is one tree carrying two names rather than two trees. We have gone with the more specific one, and you should know that the sources disagree. They disagree on the date too, mildly. The register's history note guesses the tree belongs to the founding period of the park, when Zocher converted Alkmaar's 1565 ramparts into a landscape in 1870, while the planting band in the same file points two decades later. Nobody wrote it down at the time. What is not in doubt is the survival. A hundred and thirty years is an extraordinary innings for any elm in the Netherlands, and this one has stood the whole time on the rampart behind the cultural centre, about seventy metres from the bastion's other old elm.