The White Elm east of the English Garden

German calls this tree the Flatter-Ulme, the flutter elm, after flowers that hang on stalks long enough to shake in a breeze. In English it is the European white elm, and it is one of the few elms that is genuinely at home here: the species belongs to the river floodplains of central and eastern Europe, the kind of wet lowland Berlin is built on. That matters more for an elm than for most trees. Dutch elm disease took most of Europe's elms in the twentieth century, and the white elm came through better than its relatives, because the bark beetles that carry the fungus tend to pass it over. A grown one in a city park is still worth stopping for. Berlin protects this one for its Eigenart, its distinctiveness, and made it Naturdenkmal 1-38/B on 2 March 1993. The register does not say what struck the people who chose it, so you will have to decide that for yourself on the spot. It has company: a pedunculate oak protected the same day stands about 55 metres away, a silver lime about 85, and a Lebanon oak just beyond them, a small grove of separately listed trees east of the English Garden. Nobody has published its age or its girth. If you have a tape measure with you, we would like the number.