The Smithsonian Witness Elm

The Smithsonian catalogues this tree the way it catalogues everything else. It is accession number 1 in the Smithsonian Gardens Tree Collection, the first of roughly 1,900 living specimens held as museum objects, and it stood on this corner long before the museum behind it opened in 1910. The measurements are why it holds that number. Five and a half metres round, about twenty six metres up, and a crown thirty five metres across, on a species that the century after its planting nearly wiped out. Dutch elm disease reached Washington in 1950 and took most of the American elms on the Mall over the following forty years. This one kept going, and the Smithsonian's gardeners call it the Witness Elm for everything that has passed it on its way between the White House and the Capitol. Its age is an open question, and the two answers come from different kinds of evidence. The sign at its foot and the Smithsonian's own magazine both say planted around 1850. Smithsonian Gardens, which owns it, calls it more than two hundred years old, which would have it here before the British burned the city in 1814. A planting record and a growth estimate disagree by half a century and we have not resolved it, so the page gives both.