The Elm of Elsenhoeve

This elm is alive because somebody injects it, every year. The register's entire note on the tree is one line of Dutch saying exactly that: treated annually against elm disease. Dutch elm disease emptied European streets of a tree that used to define them. The fungus travels from tree to tree in bark beetles and can wilt a mature elm within a season. It is named after the Netherlands not because it began here but because Dutch scientists were the ones who identified the fungus, in the 1920s, which is roughly when this tree went into the ground: the register puts its planting between 1920 and 1930. It has lived its whole life alongside the thing that kills its kind, through a century in which most of Europe's elms disappeared. Ulmus x hollandica is a natural hybrid, wych elm crossed with field elm, and the Amsterdam region is one of the few places in Europe where elms are still an ordinary street tree rather than a rescued specimen. That took decades of felling infected wood, watching for beetles, and precisely the treatment this one gets. It stands in front of Speelboerderij Elsenhoeve, a children's farm on the Bankrasweg in Amstelveen, so most of the people underneath it are five years old and looking at goats. The pin marks the garden rather than the trunk, and only the national register describes this tree, so if you know more of it, tell us.