The Feather Elm of Vosseparkje (north-west)

The park this elm stands in was laid out around the city's drinking water. In 1872 Gerrit Vlaskamp landscaped the grounds of a water reservoir on the west side of Leeuwarden, and the Vosseparkje is what became of it. The reservoir came first and the park followed. It was redesigned in 1926, by which point the elm was long in place: the register dates its planting to between 1900 and 1910. Old elms are not a common sight in this country. Disease took most of them over the last century, which is reason enough to walk over to one that is 120 years old and still standing. This is a feather elm, pluimiep in Dutch, a cultivar that takes its name in both languages from the shape of the crown, upright and narrow where a common elm spreads wide. The register's description of it runs to nine words: a fine feather elm on the north side of the park. That is the whole written record. The historical centre's walking tour of the Vosseparkwijk passes the park without naming it, and so does the city's monumental green route. Whatever else is known about this tree sits in somebody's memory rather than in an archive, and we would like to hear it. A second feather elm of the same cultivar stands at the far end of the park, by the pond.