The Feather Elms of Molenstraat

The graft on this street elm has swollen into a collar of scar tissue with a circumference of more than five metres, wider at that single point than the trunk of almost anything else on this list. Two feather elms, a narrow, upright cultivar of wych elm, stand about ten metres apart in an ordinary two by two metre planting pit on a residential street. Both were grafted roughly 1.5 metres above the ground when they were planted, a standard way to propagate this cultivar, and in the ninety-odd years since, the graft union on the larger of the two has ballooned far beyond the trunk it sits on. An oak fern has taken root in the crown of that same tree, an epiphyte quietly living in the canopy of a street planting that most passersby probably read as unremarkable. The Dutch national register of monumental trees lists the pair under its dendrological category: official recognition for two elms that most of Molenstraat likely walks past without a second look.