Our crowning curio

In honor of Leap Day, yesterday I skipped a post but not a visit, and today I skipped a visit but not a post. (Leap Year brings out tortured references in all of us, it seems; this weekend, the Prospect Park Zoo is doing programming about frogs.) As the sun set on this frigid extra bit of February, I went through the rabbit hole of the Cleft Ridge Span. The last of the park's arches to be completed, it's made of molded concrete blocks, and the interior of the vault is lined with this gorgeous relief pattern.

 

Just beyond lies one of the park's iconic treasures, the Camperdown elm. Every Camperdown elm in the world is a grafted offspring of a single mutant elm branch discovered by a gardener in 1830s Dundee, Scotland; the squat tree spreads into a tortuously sculptural canopy that, in full leaf, resembles a giant emerald-green mushroom. They're actually more interesting naked*; one of the branches (below) looks like a sea monster breaching behind its protective fence.

This specimen, given to the park in 1872, was already a landmark during the presidential administration of Teddy Roosevelt, and through the next century it proved mysteriously resistant to Dutch elm disease. It also has the distinction of being the tree saved by a poem. Back in the Sixties, it was found to be diseased, and its hollowed-out trunk needed fancy orthopedic rigging. Poet Marianne Moore (an eccentric who larked about in a tricorn hat and cape) appealed for its rescue in a poem for The New Yorker, and funds poured in.

*Naked Camperdown versus foliage-clad Camperdown to come this summer:

               

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, The Camperdown Elm (1967)

Image, bottom right: Gary Osgood, Creative Commons license

Comments

[Louise Crawford]

Brenda, I LOVE what you're doing!!! It's fascinating. I did a post about you today.