The Maple and Elm of the Botanical Garden Gate

A maple and an elm share one protection order at the vehicle gate of Warsaw University's Botanical Garden, designated together in 1988 rather than as two separate trees. They stand close enough to touch, sixty metres from the garden's famous 1824 ginkgo, at the entrance most visitors walk straight past on their way to the more famous specimen. Acer platanoides, the Norway maple, is common enough across the city that Warsaw plants it as an ordinary street tree; what earns this specimen its own designation is simply standing at this gate long enough to outgrow the ordinary. Ulmus laevis, the European white elm, is a rarer thing to see reach old age anywhere in Europe: Dutch elm disease has killed most mature elms on the continent since the 1970s, and a surviving specimen this size is itself a small piece of evidence about which trees a city's beetles never quite reached. Both stand inside the garden's grounds on Aleje Ujazdowskie, so the ticket that gets a visitor to the ginkgo gets them here first.