The Three Elms of the Grote Kerk

The national register counts these three trees as one. They stand in a row against the flank of the Grote Kerk on the Kerkplein, planted together and listed together under a single number. The church behind them went up between 1470 and 1518, on a raised sand ridge, which in this corner of Holland is the difference between solid ground and a building that slowly sinks into it. The elms are four centuries younger than the wall they lean toward. The register dates them to about 1920. The city's own 2017 list of monumental trees puts the same planting at 1910 to 1920. Nobody holds a planting record, so the honest answer is somewhere inside that decade. A hundred years is a long run for a Dutch elm. The disease that emptied avenues across this country travels by bark beetle and by root graft from one trunk to the next, which makes a tight row of three the arrangement most likely to be lost as a set. These three were not. A diseased elm on the ramparts a few hundred metres away was taken down as recently as 2019. The square they shade is now the forecourt of theater De Vest, so on most evenings there is a queue standing under them.