The Last Elm of College Park

Trinity College once had around sixty elms scattered across its grounds, and Dutch elm disease is the obvious explanation for why almost none of them are left. Trinity's own botanists checked and found no trace of the fungus in college specimens, and now suspect something duller: soil conditions doing slowly what the disease usually does fast. Whatever the cause, this wych elm in College Park is the survivor, the last of a population that once shaded most of the campus and that mostly vanished across Ireland and Britain from the 1970s onward. Nobody at Trinity has put a number on its age. It was already established enough by the 1970s to be counted among the trees dying around it, which sets a floor under its age rather than a figure: call it at least eighty years, probably more. College Park is Trinity's cricket ground rather than a garden, so the elm shares its patch of grass with match days and net practice, a five minute walk from the queue for the Book of Kells and entirely ignored by it. It is easy to miss for the same reason it survived: nobody was watching this one closely enough to notice it was different, until one day it was the only elm left standing.