There is a tree in Prospect Park, just south of the boathouse, that I sometimes visit, a tree Marianne Moore saved when she wrote a poem about it which appeared in The New Yorker. The tree is a Camperdown Elm planted in 1872, one of the first camperdown elms planted in this country. The cultivar originated in a forest in Scotland in the 1830s. It can only be propagated by grafting, not by seeds, and is miraculously resistant to Dutch elm disease. By 1967, the Prospect Park tree had become neglected. Moore called attention to the tree’s plight with her poem, which concludes:
Props are needed and tree-food. It is still leafing;
still there. Mortal though. We must save it. It is
our crowning curio.
Now the tree has crutches. And a fence around it. The last time I visited the tree was October of the year before last. I didn’t take a photo, which I think is strange, because for several years I’ve been working on an essay about trees in New York City, and I like to document the trees I visit. It was designated one of the “Great Trees of New York City” in 1985. I was staying in Lefferts Gardens for two weeks, a self-imposed writing residency, and I walked in the park quite a lot. In Brattleboro, Vermont, the small town in which I live, there is a Camperdown Elm across from the library. Years ago, I visited this tree and saw underneath it a tiny sign that read RIP Wormy.
-Morgan English