The Preston Twin

Two elms were planted here around 1613, almost certainly as part of a hedgerow, on land local accounts put under the Bishop of Chichester at the time, and grew into what Brighton and Hove City Council calls the largest and oldest surviving English elms in Europe. They had no name until Peter Bourne, the volunteer curator of the National Elm Collection, which Brighton hosts, measured them in the late 1980s and called them the Preston Twins. The eastern twin was damaged in a storm in 2017, caught Dutch elm disease the following year, and was felled in December 2019 to keep the infection off its neighbour. Its wood was carved, gilded and raised again on the same ground in spring 2023. So the north end of Preston Park holds one living elm of about 410 years and the worked remains of its twin. The survivor is 6.38 metres round and was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II under the Queen's Green Canopy in May 2022. It holds a colony of White-letter Hairstreak butterflies, which lay only on elm. Dutch elm disease took the mature English elm almost everywhere else. Brighton has cut infected wood out of its elms since the early 1970s, and since 2023 it has also inoculated them against the disease, the first council in the UK to run such a programme by local account: 200 elms the first year, around 1,400 in 2025. This pair is what that buys: one still growing, one still standing, carved.