This elm is one of the oldest living things on Manhattan Island, and almost everything colorful ever said about it is unproven.
Photo: Marty Aligata (Msact) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
English Elm
Ulmus procera
Dutch elm disease took the mature English elm almost everywhere in England, so most of the old ones now stand somewhere else. We map 10 of them, in 6 cities.
Brighton is the exception: it has cut infected wood out of its elms since the early 1970s, and the surviving Preston Twin, planted around 1613 in what was probably a hedgerow, is 6.38 metres round; its felled twin was carved and raised again on the same ground. Melbourne kept its elms too. In Boston, Saint-Gaudens built his memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th around a pair planted between 1772 and 1812, on a vault designed to spare their roots. New York's Hangman's Elm on Washington Square is put at 300 years or more, with a nickname no court or newspaper record supports. Portland's was the only elm left on its block after the Columbus Day Storm of 1962.
New York
It has been called the largest street tree in Manhattan, and it goes by the Dinosaur.
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux are remembered for Central Park and Prospect Park, but some of their planting still stands in Fort Greene.
Madison Square Park is probably younger than two of its trees.
Melbourne
The English elm barely exists as a mature tree in England any more.
Boston
Augustus Saint-Gaudens's memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th was built around these two elms, not the other way round.
Baltimore
Baltimore tradition holds that Frederick Douglass planted this elm as a boy, while he was still enslaved in the city.
Brighton
Two elms were planted here around 1613, almost certainly as part of a hedgerow, on land local accounts put under the Bishop of Chichester at the time, and grew into what Brighton and Hove City Coun...
The Royal Pavilion's garden holds an elm older than the Pavilion.
Portland
The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 flattened roughly 15 billion board feet of Pacific Northwest timber and gusted to 116mph over Portland.
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