The Elm Allee of Literary Walk

Central Park's most photographed avenue of trees is not the original one. The Mall, also called Literary Walk, has been replanted with American elms twice before the row standing today: the first two plantings failed when foot traffic compacted the soil around the roots, and the elms there now went in during the 1920s, the third attempt, protected from the start by low fencing along the path. That makes these trees roughly a century old, not the century and a half some press coverage implies by counting from the park's 1858 design. NYC Parks lists the grove as an official Great Tree, and it is often called the largest grove of American elms in the world, a claim the park's own conservancy states more carefully: one of the largest remaining plantations of a species that Dutch elm disease has been cutting down, city-wide, since the 1930s. Central Park still holds about 1,600 elms, several hundred on a rotating fungicide programme, and still loses 15 to 30 a year to the same disease that ended the first two plantings here by other means. Walk the Mall in full leaf and it reads as a cathedral aisle, two unbroken rows meeting overhead. Every one of them is a replacement, and every one of them is still, by the numbers, worth the trip.