Camperdown Elm

Around 1835 a forester on the Earl of Camperdown's estate near Dundee found a young elm growing contorted and weeping instead of upright, and because the mutation will not come from seed, every specimen since has been a cutting grafted onto a straight trunked host. Brooklyn has two of them. The famous one went in behind Prospect Park's Boathouse in 1872 and had declined so badly by the 1960s that the poet Marianne Moore wrote in its defence; the second stands two miles south in Green-Wood, and nobody recorded when. Edinburgh's grows by the main door of St Cuthbert's, a parish site far older than the 1894 building on it. Three are mapped, and none of them has a straight branch anywhere.