The Elm of the Wilhelminapark West Gate

Most elms this old are firewood. Dutch elm disease carries the country's name because Dutch pathologists were the ones who identified the fungus behind it, in 1921, not because it started here, and over the century that followed it killed the great majority of Europe's mature elms. This one is still standing at the west gate of Wilhelminapark, which is the whole reason to walk over and look at it. The register puts its planting between 1880 and 1890, roughly 136 to 146 years, so it was already a grown tree when the disease was first named, and it has outlived generations of elms planted long after it. That band also runs slightly ahead of the park's own opening in 1898. Either the tree was on the ground before the park was drawn around it, or the band is a decade-wide estimate rather than a record, and nothing we found settles which. The register calls it a Hollandse iep, Dutch elm, which is less precise than it sounds: the name covers a group of hybrids and a long list of nursery clones, several of them bred specifically for disease resistance in the decades after 1921. Nobody has pinned down which one this is. If you know your elms, the west entrance is the place to settle it.