The Zelkova of Landbohojskolens Have

Seven and a half metres around, and not one of those metres measures a trunk. The zelkova near the northeastern corner of Landbohojskolens Have is four separate stems that have grown into each other and into a single crown, and the register's 2022 survey counted them. The university's own history of this garden describes the habit along Bulowsvej: several saplings dropped into one planting hole, a nineteenth-century idea about how to get a big tree in a hurry. It worked. At 17 metres the tree is not tall, but it is wide in a way one stem could not manage. Zelkova serrata is the Japanese keyaki, the timber of temple halls and the standard street tree of Tokyo. It is an elm relative that the elms' own disease largely leaves alone, which is part of why European gardens took to it in the first place. This one has trouble of its own instead: the register records a fungal infection in the southeastern stem, the kind of thing that decides slowly how many of the four are still standing in fifty years. Nobody has dated the planting. What is recorded is the method, and you can read it off the tree: four ways up, one way out.