Nightmare on Elm Street

Right here in Prospect Park, we have perhaps the most notable and distinguished tree in New York City. It's the Camperdown Elm, just off the Boathouse. (I'm not being ironic, people. It's a seriously cool tree.) Take that, you Bitches Across the Bridge.

Shame on us though - we almost fucked it up.

It was planted near the corner of the Boathouse, just to the South, in 1872. It's kind of hard to describe, but suffice it to say, it looks like the a giant mutant bonsai tree with weeping branches. In fact, ducking under the canopy is sort of like entering a little hobbit house. I wish there weren't a huge fence around it (totally sucks), but I suppose we must protect the thing. It's rare, you know. 

There's this estate in Dundee, Scotland, which belonged to the Earl of Camperdown. Well, the old Earl's head tree man discovered a mutant branch growing along the ground (as opposed to growing skyward). Tree-Guy created the first Camperdown Elm by grafting it onto the trunk of a Wych Elm - curiously, the only elm species that the Camperdown will canoodle with ... it will not successfully graft onto any other root stock. Ergo, that original mutant cutting is the Baby-Daddy of every Camperdown in existence.

There was a little Camperdown soap-opera when the fourth and final Earl hopped the pond and moved to Boston. I wonder if he ever took the trip to Brooklyn to see his tree? Lord Camperdown (of the Boston Camperdowns) never had any children, so all his titles expired when he died in Boston in 1933.

The rare tree was a gift of Mr. A. G. Burgess to Prospect Park in 1872. Can you dig that? This thing is one-hundred forty years old! 

Well, no good deed goes unpunished. (Sorry, Mr. Burgess.) By the 1960s, the tree was dying - the result of neglect, improper cutting, and just pain poor care. Mercifully, someone noticed. They called up Bartlett the tree guy, and lo and behold, he stuck his whole arm up inside the poor thing's wound. The elm became a right-and-proper celebrity when in 1967, Brooklyn's own Marianne Moore wrote a poem about it, and helped raise funds to pay for its treatment.

-Parker

THE CAMPERDOWN ELM

I think, in connection with this weeping elm,
of "Kindred Spirits" at the edge of a rockledge
overlooking a stream:
Thanatopsis-invoking tree-loving Bryant
conversing with Thomas Cole
in Asher Durand's painting of them
under the filigree of an elm overhead.

No doubt they had seen other trees -- lindens,
maples and sycamores, oaks and the Paris
street-tree, the horse-chestnut; but imagine
their rapture, had they come on the Camperdown elm's
massiveness and "the intricate pattern of its branches,"
arching high, curving low, in its mist of fine twigs.
The Bartlett tree-cavity specialist saw it
and thrust his arm the whole length of the hollowness
of its torso and there were six small cavities also.

Props are needed and tree-food. It is still leafing;
still there. Mortal though. We must save it. It is
our crowning curio.

-Marianne Moore

camperdown elm canopy photo courtesy of www.prospectpark.org