The Karpfenteich Elm

Nobody knows how old this elm is, and that is the honest answer rather than a gap waiting to be filled. Berlin protects it as natural monument 4-27/B at the southeastern corner of the carp pond behind Charlottenburg Palace, and neither the city register nor the surveyors who have measured it twice will put a year on it. What is on record is size and a near standstill. Its trunk was 4.85 metres around in 2015 and 4.88 metres in 2020, roughly six millimetres of growth a year, the pace of a tree that finished the growing part of its life a long time ago. A laser put it at 21.5 metres tall in July 2020. The species is the reason to look twice. European white elm is uncommon in city plantings, and Dutch elm disease has taken most of the big elms across the continent over the past century, so a mature one of this girth is a survivor rather than a specimen. Its address helps. The grounds were laid out in the 1690s as the formal garden of Sophie Charlotte's summer palace and later loosened into an English landscape park, and the carp pond it stands on belongs to that second version. The swamp cypress at the other end of the same park is about a hundred metres away. The last published photographs of the elm were taken in February 2015 and July 2020.