The Dutch Elms of Kalverbos

Fourteen elms stand at one corner of a park that used to be a cemetery. Kalverbos served as Delft's burial ground for 46 years before the city moved its dead to the Jaffalaan in 1874, and when the empty ground became a public park two decades later, laid out in the romantic style by garden architect Hugo Poortman, these trees were already grown. The register dates them to between 1860 and 1870, planted while this was still consecrated ground, which puts them at about 160 years old. Four graves were left in place rather than moved, and the strangest belongs to Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a Prussian clockmaker who spent his life insisting he was the lost Dauphin of France, Louis XVII, smuggled out of prison as a child while a substitute died in his place. Nobody believed him while he lived, and DNA testing in 2000 finally settled the argument against him, but his grave in this Dutch park still carries the fleur-de-lis of French royalty. The elms have their own survival story. Dutch elm disease, named for the country that first identified it, swept through the Netherlands twice in the twentieth century and emptied whole streets of exactly this species. This grove made it through both waves and is now one of Delft's protected monumental groups.