The Caucasian Elm That Was Cut Back to Save It

In the 1980s this tree lost roughly two thirds of its height in a single operation, and it is still on the national register. The garden planted a Caucasian elm here in 1827 and it grew the way the species does, slowly, into a trunk now close to six metres around. Then a fungal outbreak arrived, named in one register as Dutch elm disease, and the answer was surgery rather than a saw at the base. The branches came off hard, and what stands today is a fluted grey column carrying a crown regrown out of the cuts. The national register still lists this tree at thirty metres tall. The 2021 field survey measured ten. Both numbers are honest, they simply belong to different decades, and the difference between them is the operation. Zelkova carpinifolia is not an elm, whatever everyone calls it. It is a close cousin from a small range in the Caucasus and along the southern shore of the Caspian, and it is planted across Europe precisely because it shrugs off the disease that emptied the continent of its elms, which is worth thinking about while standing in front of one that needed cutting back anyway. The trunk is the thing to look at: buttressed, silver, and wildly out of proportion to everything above it.