The Oudemanhuispoort Elm

The tallest tree in Amsterdam stands in a courtyard barely wider than it is tall. The Hollandse iep in the Oudemanhuispoort reaches 35 metres, higher than anything else in the city, and the enclosure is the reason. Brick buildings surround the garden on four sides, so a tree here has exactly one direction available to it, and this one took it. The register puts the planting at 1890. The Oudemanhuispoort was built in the eighteenth century as an almshouse for the city's elderly poor. It belongs to the University of Amsterdam now, and the vaulted passage along one side has carried a second-hand book market for well over a century. Thousands of students walk past the trunk every day on the way to a lecture, which is a lot of foot traffic for a tree almost nobody has heard of. The species is the other half of it. Dutch elm disease reached the Netherlands in the 1920s and killed elms here by the hundred thousand, and Amsterdam, an elm city by tradition, lost a great deal of its stock. This one was already about thirty years old when the disease arrived, and it is still going. Go on a weekday, in from the Kloveniersburgwal end, and look into the southwest corner. It is not a tree that announces itself from the street, because from the street you cannot see it at all.