Despite the many obituaries for British elms, their death has been greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain might have said. North Derbyshire is full of them, despite elm disease. There are superb centurion elms in Buxtonâs town centre, but my favourite is here on the path to Errwood Hall.
I confess that Iâve walked past it many times over the last half-century and hadnât previously noticed it. That inattention speaks of the treeâs deepest and â if itâs not too contradictory â grandest quality: its ability to stand to one side, to live unseen in full view, to flourish outside our ken. It is all the more magnificent for living so truly unto itself.
Not to suggest for a second that this wych elm is a solitary organism. It is itself entangled among taller oak and chestnut woodland, but every part of it is further smothered in other organisms. Fountain sprays of polypody (fern) erupt from several parts and all the branches, even some twigs, are engorged by mosses, including (I suspect) the appropriately named mamillate plait-moss. These also drip down from their tree anchor in long stalactitic hanks.
This overcoat bulks it up and gives it a green-furred, almost animate character. Add in the tentacular sway of its upper body and an arachnid droop in one half of the limbs, and you have some primordial, eldritch beast. In his monumental work The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist summarises the latest research on the cognitive capabilities of plants. You have only to look at this tree to know it also âknowsâ things.
There is a further defining quality in elms that this one illustrates perfectly. The treeâs outer surface is often dense, matted and gnarly with rootlets, and on other elms Iâve seen these excrescences swell into enormously thick, cankerous bosses. Elms literally bristle with extra vitality, the very bark seems prolific and promiscuous. The Goyt elm is one of the only trees I know where the leaves â and such lovely rough-crinkled leaves â sheath around the trunk itself. Come here in April and the thickness of that foliage flushes this part of the path in a green light so dense you could swim in it.
