The Caucasian Elm of the Botanic Garden

Nobody can agree how tall this tree is. It reaches over 30 metres in the garden's north zone along the Paseo de Mutis, and garden staff and visiting botanists put the exact figure several metres apart depending on the method, which is the ordinary fate of a tree measured from the ground by eye rather than climbed with a tape. The species itself, Zelkova carpinifolia, comes from mountain forests spanning Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran, and only reached European gardens in the 18th century, part of the same wave of scientific plant collecting that filled Madrid's garden with foreign specimens under royal sponsorship. It is a relative of the elms without being one, which is how it has come through a century of Dutch elm disease that emptied streets across Europe of the real thing. This particular tree is roughly two centuries old, which for a species this fast-growing means it reached close to its full height early and has held it ever since. It carries singular tree designation number 260 in the Community of Madrid's regional catalogue, one number among 280 protected specimens across the wider region.