The Elm of Zatory

An elm marks a bus terminus outside Nadrazi Holesovice, and it is the last thing standing from a street. Na Zatorach once ran through old Holesovice, cleared in stages from the 1950s into the late 1970s: first for a concrete plant, then for the railway yard, then for the metro station and bus depot that occupy the ground today. One house, kept for its old street number, and this elm are what is left of it. Prague's register of significant trees measured the trunk at 2.26 metres round in 2016 and put the tree at about 180 years old that year, which puts it near 190 now. The write-ups behind that figure trace back to the same 2016 survey rather than to two separate measurements, so treat the age as an estimate carried from one source, not a settled fact. The species explains why it is the one tree that made it. European white elm tolerates wet, disturbed ground better than most trees, which is exactly what a rail yard and a bus turning circle produce, and it carries more resistance to Dutch elm disease than the common elm that wiped out most of the continent's street elms in the twentieth century. It stands where a demolished neighbourhood ends and a metro line begins, four kilometres north of the old town, ringed by the bus turning circle that is now the closest thing Zatory has to an address.