The Ivy Elm of Park Oliwski

Most of Europe's big elms are dead. Dutch elm disease killed them by the tens of millions across the twentieth century, which is why a European white elm with a trunk 420 centimetres round and a crown at 30 metres is now a genuinely rare thing to walk up to. This one stands by the pond in Park Oliwski and has been protected since 1 July 1988, which makes it one of the older entries on Gdansk's register. It is not registered under its own name. Poland's entry, number 576, calls it wiaz z kwitnacym bluszczem pospolitym: an elm with flowering common ivy. The ivy going up the trunk is part of what is protected. Ivy only flowers once it has climbed high enough to reach real light, which takes decades, and when it does it flowers in autumn, weeks after everything else has finished, pulling wasps and late bees onto a tree nothing else is visiting. Standing under it in October you hear it before you work out what you are hearing. Nobody has counted the rings. An elm of this girth is usually put somewhere between 150 and 250 years old, and that band comes from the trunk rather than from any document, so take it as the wide guess it is. What is not a guess is that the tree outlived the epidemic that took nearly every elm its size on the continent.