Ulmus × hollandica 'Vegeta'


Ulmus × hollandica 'Vegeta', sometimes known as the Huntingdon Elm, is an old English hybrid cultivar raised at Brampton, near Huntingdon, by nurserymen Wood & Ingram in 1746, allegedly from seed collected from an Ulmus × hollandica hybrid at nearby Hinchingbrooke Park. The tree was given the epithet 'Vegeta' by Loudon, a name previously accorded the Chichester Elm by Donn, as Loudon considered the two trees identical. The latter is indeed a similar cultivar, but raised much earlier in the 18th century from a tree growing at Chichester Hall, Rawreth in Essex.

Description

In areas unaffected by Dutch elm disease, Huntingdon Elms commonly grow to over 35 m, bearing long, straight branches ascending from a short bole < 4 m in height; the bole of mature trees has distinctive lattice-patterned bark-ridges which distinguish the tree from another popular U. × hollandica cultivar 'Major', known as 'Dutch Elm', whose bark breaks into small shallow flakes. The glossy, oval leaves, borne on smooth branchlets that never feature corky wings, have petioles >10 mm long, which distinguish the tree from the Wych Elm, and are very distinctly asymmetric at the base, < 12 cm long by < 7.5 cm broad contracting to an acuminate apex. The tightly-clustered apetalous flowers are bright red, and appear in early spring. The samarae are obovate, < 25 mm long.
A distinguishing feature of 'Vegeta', according to Schneider and Mitchell, is that the leaf margins to right and left of the petiole start from a vein, not from the midrib. 'Vegeta'-type leaves from Hinchingbrooke Park collected by Heybroek in 1960 do not share this feature, nor do some old 'Vegeta' cultivars in Oxford and Edinburgh. This unusual feature, however, clearly appears in the older cultivar, Chichester Elm, and is frequently present in younger 'Vegeta' elsewhere. If indeed the feature distinguishes Chichester from Huntingdon, the former may be more common in cultivation than currently believed, having over time been mis-called "Huntingdon". A 2013 DNA test of old Chichester elms did not include a younger nursery-sourced "Huntington" as a "control".
Elwes & Henry and Bean attested that 'Vegeta' suckers freely, but other writers have stated that it does not sucker at all. This contradiction is almost certainly owing to methods of propagation: higher class nurseries grafted cuttings onto Wych Elm stock, which would not produce suckers, whilst others simply rooted the cuttings, which would. A comparatively high percentage of the seed is usually viable, but produces variable offspring.

Pests and diseases

The tree was one of four European cultivars found by researchers in The Netherlands to be resistant to the initial strain of Dutch elm disease, Ophiostoma ulmi, prevalent in the 1920s and '30s, the others being 'Monumentalis' Rinz, 'Berardii' and 'Exoniensis'. The four were rated less resistant than U. foliacea clone 23, from Spain, later cultivated as 'Christine Buisman'. 'Vegeta' has, however, only a marginal resistance to the later, three times more lethal strain, Ophiostoma novo-ulmi.

Cultivation

The tree was widely planted in England, particularly between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, owing to its very rapid growth and attractive wide-spreading form, but its habit of forking sometimes led to splitting of the trunk and premature death. On the continent it was marketed in the late 19th century by the Späth nursery of Berlin as U. vegeta Loud., 'Huntingdon elm', and by the Ulrich nursery of Warsaw as U. montana vegeta, whence it was introduced to Eastern Europe, surviving there in several arboreta. Introduced to the USA, it appeared in the catalogues of Hovey's nursery of Boston, Massachusetts, from the 1850s, as Ulmus glabra vegeta, 'Huntingdon Elm', as U. vegeta in the 1902 catalogue of the Bobbink and Atkins nursery, Rutherford, New Jersey, and as U. Huntingdoni in the catalogues of Kelsey's, New York, and of the Plumfield Nursery of Fremont, Nebraska, where it was described as 'one of the finest of this family'. It was planted at the Dominion Arboretum, Ottawa, in 1893 as U. montana Huntingdoni, Also introduced to Australasia, the tree was marketed by several Australian nurseries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Owing to its resistance to the original strain of Dutch elm disease, 'Vegeta' was planted in large numbers across Amsterdam after the Second World War as a replacement for 'Belgica', but was itself eventually replaced by the Dutch cultivar 'Dodoens' following the arrival of the more lethal strain of DED in the early 1970s.

Notable trees

The UK TROBI Champion grew at Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire, measuring 28 m high by 167 cm d.b.h. in 1999 but was felled in 2014; another at Courteenhall in the same county measured 166 cm d.b.h.. In London, many examples still survive, notably around the Millfields Recreation Ground, the largest measuring 31 m high by 88 cm d.b.h.; others can be found at Hackney, two in Gibson Square, Islington, and one in Westminster known as The Marylebone Elm. Several dozen planted in the 1920s survive on Southsea Common in Portsmouth, isolated from disease by the sea and urban sprawl. Lincoln has five examples on Yarborough Crescent and in Hull there are four on Brunswick Avenue. One tree survives at the foot of Ladies Mile, Bristol. Another elm is located in Sheffield, as a street tree on the corner of Chelsea Road, and known locally as the Chelsea Elm.
In Wales, one very large tree stood in the grounds of Powis Castle, near Welshpool; others have been reported from Abergavenny and Caernarfon. Edinburgh has several of note, in The Meadows and Bruntsfield Links, in Inverleith Park, Fettes College, and Abercromby Place. In Éire, 'Vegeta' is represented by a tree at the Kildangan Stud, Kildangan.
Notable plantings in Australia include the Avenue of Honour in Ballarat, and Brisbane Avenue, Canberra. Mature specimens line the main street in Healesville, Victoria. Some very large specimens survive in New Zealand, notably in Auckland where it is considered "the finest of all the elms" in that city. The 16 trees planted in 1922 around the rotunda at Auckland Zoo were described as "magnificent... with stately crowns and spreading, drooping branches".

'Vegeta'-like cultivars

s between Wych and Field Elm are fully fertile, but produce widely variant progeny. An elm at Magdalen College, Oxford, long believed to be a wych elm, then identified by Elwes as a 'Vegeta'-type hybrid, was for a time the largest elm known in Britain before it was blown down in 1911. An old 'Vegeta'-type hybrid stands at the University College sports ground, Abingdon Road, Oxford. Bean noted that hybrids similar to Huntingdon occur naturally in parts of east-central England and may have been raised by nurseries and distributed, and that the raising and distributing of cultivars from the seed of Huntingdon will have produced elms similar to, but not the true Huntingdon clone.
A mature weeping elm survives near Actons Farm in the vicinity of the Rivers Nursery, Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, which closed in the 1980s. The tree has leaves of similar size to those of the Huntingdon Elm, but slightly oblong in shape, and often either revolute or convolute. The proximity of the Actons tree to the Rivers Nursery would seem more than coincidence, as the nursery was known to have sold seedlings, rather than clones, of the Huntingdon Elm, a practice which resulted in a lawsuit brought by a disgruntled nurseryman at the Oxford Assizes in 1847. Elwes noted that in Hertfordshire and along the western borders of Essex "the most graceful form of this tree may be seen in perfection", but he identified it as Ulmus nitens.
The weeping elm once grown at Kew as 'Wentworthii Pendula' was identified by Melville as U. × vegeta, though its leaf and form differ from those of Huntingdon Elm.

Synonymy

North America

Australasia