The Last Elm of Stationsplein

Around thirty elms were planted in front of Amsterdam Centraal after the station opened in 1889. One of them is still standing. The rest went to Dutch elm disease, which reached the Netherlands in the 1920s and then killed elms across the country by the hundred thousand. The fungus travels in bark beetles and blocks the tree's own water vessels, so a mature elm can go from healthy to dead inside one summer. Amsterdam's elm stock, one of the largest in Europe, was hit hard. This tree stood through all of it, on one of the busiest pieces of ground in the Netherlands, and surveyors still rate its condition as reasonable. It is not resting on its history either. When it was last measured in 2022 its trunk was over three metres round, and it is recorded as adding a little more than a centimetre of girth every year, which is a tree still doing business rather than hanging on. By that same 2022 survey the city had planted young elms on the square around it. If those take, the old view in front of the station slowly comes back and this one stops being the last of anything, which is what everybody involved would prefer. Free, in the open, straight out of the station's main doors. Trams, bikes and the whole flow of the station pass within metres of it, and almost nobody looks up.