The Rockey Elm

A Portland architect once parked his car against this elm so the removal crew could not reach it. It worked. The city council had condemned the tree in 1963. The owner of the building in front of it wanted it gone, worried that its roots were working into his foundations, and applied for a removal permit. Lewis Crucher's car bought enough time for Mayor Terry Schrunk to place a moratorium on that permit while the city forester and the city engineer went and looked at the tree themselves. What followed ran in the Oregonian for months: a vigil at the trunk, a poem printed in the paper, and a letter from Dr Eugene W. Rockey recalling that his father had planted the elm in 1900 in front of their newly built house, and had fitted it with a wooden slat guard to stop the family's buggy horse nipping the top off the sapling. The foresters found the tree healthy and safe. The permit was refused. It is about 24.4 metres tall with a trunk 4.60 metres around, Heritage Tree #46 since 1995. It had already come through the Columbus Day Storm the year before the council came for it, which means it survived the worst windstorm in the region's recorded history and then very nearly lost to a building permit. Its opposite number, the Storm Elm, stands directly across Flanders Street.