The Olifantsiep

A truck tore off part of this elm's trunk in 2015, and it is still standing, propped now on a steel support like a boxer who refuses to sit down between rounds. Amsterdam planted this twin-stemmed elm on Zeeburgerdijk sometime between 1900 and 1915, according to conflicting municipal and conservation records, and its nickname comes from a heavy low branch that early residents thought looked like an elephant's trunk reaching toward the ground. The city has tens of thousands of elms, more per capita than almost anywhere else in Europe, a legacy of planting elms along canals for their tolerance of the polluted, waterlogged soil common near open sewers a century ago. Dutch elm disease, first identified and named in the Netherlands in the 1920s, wiped out huge numbers of European elms over the following decades, and Amsterdam's collection survived largely because of an aggressive, decades-long eradication and breeding program that continues today. The Olifantsiep, girth pushing five meters, has outlived a disease epidemic, a truck collision and the severe storm of January 2018, still leafing out every spring behind a low fence anyone can lean on.