The Olifantsiep

One branch of this elm grows so low and so heavy that the city built it a prop, and that branch is where the tree gets its name: early residents thought it looked like an elephant's trunk reaching for the ground. Amsterdam planted this twin-stemmed elm on Zeeburgerdijk sometime between 1900 and 1915, according to conflicting municipal and conservation records. 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 metres, has outlived that epidemic and the severe storm of January 2018, and still leafs out every spring behind a low fence anyone can lean on.