The Camperdown Elm

Every Camperdown elm on Earth is a clone, and this one is among the oldest. The cultivar began in the 1830s when a gardener for the Earl of Camperdown found a single mutant elm branch, contorted and weeping instead of growing upright, on the Camperdown House estate near Dundee, Scotland. Because the mutation cannot be grown from seed, every specimen since has been propagated by grafting a cutting onto a straight-trunked host, which makes each Camperdown elm in the world a genetic twin of that one Scottish branch. This graft was planted near Prospect Park's Boathouse in 1872, a gift to the young park, and by the 1960s had declined badly enough that Brooklyn nearly lost it, until the poet Marianne Moore, a devoted Prospect Park visitor, wrote publicly in its defense and helped rally the conservation campaign that saved it. She later called it Brooklyn's crowning curio. Its low, twisted canopy, propped and cabled for support, still spreads wide enough that visitors duck to walk beneath it, a shape no other tree in the park shares by nature.