Legend has it the park's 70-foot-tall, 300-year-old
English elm, famed as the "Hangman's Tree," was used to execute traitors during the Revolutionary War.
When some of the floors were renewed, the improvers managed to source some of the last commercially available
English elm to do the job properly, quite something following the elm disease disaster.
Some new areas of flooring upstairs used up rare resources of
English elm following the epidemic of 20 years ago, American elm having to do for one remaining room.
Mr David Rose, the commission's forestry pathologist, said the only way to preserve the
English elm was to maintain it at a low height, ideally in hedges, until a way to halt the spread of the disease was found.
The garden will be filled with mature
English Elms and familiar hedgerow plants evoking a shared memory of the British Countryside and a cultural heritage.
As
English elms were wiped out in the 1970s, the elm comes from Scotland - but this is singularly appropriate as Joyce's forebears were from North of the Border and her daughter Heather lives in Edinburgh.
DNA tests carried out on
English elms have suggested they descend from a single tree brought across by the Romans 2,000 years ago.
Golden-leafed
English elms bracket the gate, while a butter yellow tulip tree and a few birches beckon from inside.
English plant pathologists inspected the rock elms imported from Canada for shipbuilding and found what they initially thought was a new strain of Dutch elm disease, which they labeled "aggressive strain." After systematically sampling their countryside, the pathologists realized that this aggressive strain was spreading and killing
English elms, which like the American version were much beloved for a great variety of landscaping purposes.
Thousands of a new generation of trees have already been struck down and
English elms in the region could be facing extinction within months.
