The Field Elm of Parco Ducale

Dutch elm disease reached Italy in the 1930s and took most of the country's mature field elms with it over the following two decades, the same epidemic that emptied European streets and parks of the species almost everywhere else. This elm, growing near the Palazzetto Sanvitale inside Parco Ducale, is one of the few in the area that made it through. At 3.82 metres round and 37.5 metres tall it has grown taller than the horse chestnuts and planes usually associated with the park's grand avenues, a field elm doing what the species can do when disease does not cut it short first. Ulmus minor naturally reaches a broad, high canopy on a single strong trunk, and this one has had the decades to prove it, in a park that lost every mature tree it had once already, burned for firewood by occupying troops in 1745. The elm is deliberately not the story's dramatic tree here. It survived nothing spectacular in the way a fire or a storm is spectacular; it simply kept growing while a fungus carried by bark beetles worked through nearly everything nearby that shared its genus.