The Weteringplantsoen Wych Elm

Nobody knows when this elm was planted and the register says so outright: history unknown, planting somewhere between 1900 and 1910. What is documented is what stands in front of it. The Van Randwijk monument on the Weteringplantsoen carries the best known line in Dutch resistance writing, Henk van Randwijk's warning that a people which yields to tyrants will lose more than life and property, and then the light goes out. Van Randwijk edited the underground paper Vrij Nederland through the occupation. The tree behind the monument is a wych elm, and that is the interesting part of the label. Ulmus glabra is usually counted as the only elm truly native to the Netherlands, and it is highly susceptible to Dutch elm disease, which arrived in the 1920s and worked through the country for the rest of the century. A mature wych elm standing in a Dutch city centre is not a common thing. This one is around 120 years old, so it was here before either world war and has stood through both. It sits in a strip of grass and gravel between the Weteringschans and the water, the sort of triangle a city ends up with where two roads fail to meet cleanly. Free, always open, and a few minutes' walk from the Rijksmuseum. Three more trees on this list stand within two minutes of it.