The Arbour Elms of Jaffa Cemetery

These elms were grown to be a room rather than a trunk. The national register of monumental trees lists three of them at Jaffa cemetery as prieel elms, prieel being the Dutch word for an arbour, and records their form as weeping. Branches that hang down on every side leave a sheltered space beneath, and that space, not size, is what the register protects them for: it files them under dendrological interest, a rarity of form. The register puts their planting between 1890 and 1900, so they are roughly 125 to 135 years old. It does not say who planted them or why, and it gives no girth or height. Simply being an elm in the Netherlands for that long counts for something. Dutch elm disease takes its name from the Dutch scientists who worked out its cause around 1920, and it has been killing elms across Europe ever since. These three were already twenty years or more in the ground when it was named, and the register still lists them. Jaffa is Delft's municipal cemetery on the Jaffalaan, owned by the city and recorded in the register as open to visit. Two honest caveats. The register does not say which elm these are, so we list them simply as elm; if you can tell, tell us. And the canopy around them is dense enough that nobody has matched the register's pin to one crown, so the pin is approximate. Look for the weeping branches.