The Plume Elm of Potgietersingel

The Plume Elm of Potgietersingel does not appear on Zwolle's own list of protected trees. The municipality's 2015 survey of the city's special trees names nineteen elms across town and catalogues the rest of this exact park strip in detail, its maples, oaks, planes and even a tree of heaven, and still skips this one. The only record of it at all is the national Landelijk Register Monumentale Bomen, which dates the planting to around 1900 and calls it a Pluimiep, Dutch for plume elm, after its narrow, weeping crown. The register is not settled on what species it actually is: one entry names Ulmus x hollandica, a duplicate entry backs off to Ulmus sp. Dutch elm disease has killed most of the country's old elms since the 1970s, which makes a plume-form specimen from around 1900 still standing, in a public strip the city owns and leaves open at all hours, worth more attention than its own municipality has given it. It stands about a hundred and twenty metres from the park's Copper Beech, part of the same walk. Nobody has settled the exact cultivar, and the page would welcome someone who can.