The Shaw Memorial Elms

Augustus Saint-Gaudens's memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th was built around these two elms, not the other way round. The trees came first, planted somewhere between 1772 and 1812, probably under the 1780 permission to plant elms across from John Hancock's mansion while he was governor. The bronze arrived in 1897 and sits on a vault designed to spare their roots. The Boston Globe calls them the oldest English elms in the Western Hemisphere. One caveat on the species. Two institutional sources and the memorial's own conservation record call them English elm; a single minority account describes them as American elm. The weight of evidence sits with English elm, but the disagreement is real. Their survival is not luck. In 1927 they were written off as close to dead. The arborist Henry Davis began treating them free of charge in the 1970s and the care has never stopped: bricks packed inside the hollow trunks for stability, six to eight feet taken off the crowns in 2013, inspections every fortnight. That retrenchment pruning is what gives them the blunt, cut back outline they carry through winter. Even the cramped root vault helps, densifying the wood against Dutch elm disease. Prunings have been turned into pens and sold. The two of them stand where the Freedom Trail meets Beacon and Park, shading the regiment they now outlive by more than a century.