The Preston Twin

Two elms were planted here around 1613, almost certainly as part of a hedgerow, and grew into what Brighton and Hove City Council calls the largest and oldest surviving English elms in Europe. One of them is now a sculpture. 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 what stands at the north end of Preston Park is one living elm of about 410 years and the worked remains of the tree that grew beside it for four centuries. The survivor is 6.38 metres round, reached over 30 metres tall, 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 and have vanished from most of Britain along with the trees. That is the point of this city. Dutch elm disease took the mature English elm almost everywhere else. Brighton has cut infected wood out of its elms since the early 1970s, tree by tree, and this pair is what that buys: one still growing, one still standing, carved.