The English Elm of Darling Gardens

The English elm barely exists as a mature tree in England any more. Melbourne kept its. Dutch elm disease killed elms across Britain and Europe by the tens of millions from the 1960s on and never reached Australia, which left this city holding elm plantings of an age and size Europe lost. The National Trust of Australia dated this one at about 120 years in February 2011, so roughly 135 now, and calls it an outstanding example of the species. It stands 28 metres tall at the Gold Street end of Darling Gardens, and the City of Yarra's register gives it 154 centimetres of diameter at breast height, which is 4.84 metres of girth: the register's figure is a diameter, so every girth on this page is a conversion from one. The two registers disagree about the name. Yarra records it as Ulmus minor 'Atinia'; the Trust's entry says Ulmus procera. Both mean English elm, and botanists have spent decades arguing over whether they are one tree or two. Darling Gardens was permanently reserved in 1866 and laid out with elms and oaks in the 1890s. The Trust's dating puts this tree's planting in that same decade, which is arithmetic rather than a record: nothing ties this trunk to that scheme by name.