The Second Camperdown Elm of Green-Wood

Brooklyn has two Camperdown elms, and genetically they are the same tree. Every Camperdown elm alive is a graft from one contorted branch found on a Scottish estate near Dundee in the 1830s, a mutation that cannot be grown from seed, so each specimen is a cutting of a cutting of that single original. The famous one stands behind the Boathouse in Prospect Park, planted in 1872. This one grows two miles south, inside Green-Wood, where Garden Path meets Pink Avenue. Nobody wrote down when it went in. New York's Great Trees register named it in 1985 and recorded the species and the corner, not a date, and no later source has supplied one. What the sources do agree on is the order: this is the younger of the two, and old enough to be counted among Green-Wood's landmark trees. A precise year would have to be invented, so there is none here. The shape carries it anyway. Camperdowns arch their limbs downward and tangle them into one another instead of reaching up, which makes a low dome you duck into rather than stand under, dark inside even at midday. Victorian day-trippers came out to this cemetery in numbers that helped make the public case for Brooklyn's parks, and they came for exactly this: a landscape with curiosities in it. Green-Wood is free and open daily, and the R train stops at the gate.