The Queen's Park Champion Wych Elm

The widest wych elm recorded in Sussex stands in a dog exercise area above a children's playground. The Tree Register of the British Isles holds it as the county champion for its species on girth, 389 centimetres when it was measured in June 2020, at a height of 23 metres. Wych elm is the only elm truly native to Britain, which is part of why a champion specimen matters here beyond the size of it. Friends of Queen's Park, the group that surveys and writes up the park's trees, put it at about 200 years old and note what it has come through: Dutch elm disease, two world wars, and the Great Storm of 1987. It is not alone. The same group describes several more elms in this corner of the park at 100 to 150 years and older, which is ordinary in Brighton and close to unheard of in the rest of England, where the mature elm population went in a single generation. The champion measurement comes from that one group rather than from two independent surveys, so read 389 centimetres as their figure rather than a settled one. Anyone with a tape and four minutes can check it, and we would be glad of the number.