The Elm Inside the Burcht

Most of the street elms in the Netherlands are gone, killed since the 1970s by the disease that carries the country's name. This one is still standing, on top of an artificial mound raised in the eleventh century in the middle of Leiden, inside the ring wall of the Burcht. The national register dates its planting to the first decade of the twentieth century and admits in the same breath what that is worth: the period is an estimate, and no historical records are known. Roughly 120 years old, then, with the register's own uncertainty attached. A Dutch heritage survey of the castle confirms what grows up there without dating any of it, describing several monumental trees inside the walls, two beeches and one elm, which give the interior its particular character. This is the elm. Trees of this kind are now maintenance rather than luck. The survivors tend to be kept alive on purpose, with fungicide injected year after year, because an elm this size cannot be replaced by planting another one. The mound is older than all of it. Leiden bought the Burcht in 1651 and turned it into a public park, which it still is: free, open at any hour, and reached by a flight of steps up the side of the mound. The beeches the survey mentions are up there with it.