The European White Elm by the B2

Leipzig's own records cannot agree on how tall this elm is. The city's list of natural monuments gives it 13 metres; the municipal tree cadastre gives 24. A tree does not grow eleven metres between two lists, so one of them is out of date or wrong, and nobody has published which. The other numbers are steadier. The cadastre puts the trunk at 3.74 metres round and the crown at 12 metres across, and estimates the tree has stood for about 160 years, a figure it assigns by age class rather than from any record of planting. On that estimate it was already growing when the German Empire was proclaimed in 1871. Leipzig protects it as natural monument number 29. The European white elm is a tree of river floodplains, and Leipzig grew up on one, among the wet forests of the Weisse Elster and the Pleisse. It is also the elm that Dutch elm disease has treated most gently: the bark beetles that carry the fungus tend to pass it over. What it has not been given is a quiet address. It stands on the verge of the B2/B95, a federal road through Connewitz, at the edge of a strip of woodland. No source describes a footpath to the trunk, so this is a tree to see from the roadside rather than to sit under. The city still lists it as standing. If you have measured its height, tell us which number is right.