Ulmus × hollandica 'Major'
Elm cultivar / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ulmus × hollandica 'Major' is a distinctive cultivar that in England came to be known specifically as the Dutch Elm, although all naturally occurring Field Elm Ulmus minor × Wych Elm U. glabra hybrids are loosely termed 'Dutch elm' (U. × hollandica). It is also known by the cultivar name 'Hollandica'. Nellie Bancroft considered 'Major' either an F2 hybrid or a backcrossing with one of its parents.[1]
Ulmus × hollandica 'Major' | |
---|---|
Hybrid parentage | U. glabra × U. minor |
Cultivar | 'Major' |
Origin | northern France and Low Countries; (as cultivar) England |
According to Richens the tree was a native of Picardy and elsewhere in northern France, where it was known from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries as ypereau or ypreau.[2] 'Major' was said to have been introduced to England from the Netherlands in the late seventeenth century as a fashion-elm associated with William and Mary,[3] the name 'Dutch Elm' having been coined by Queen Mary's resident botanist Dr Leonard Plukenet.[4]
The epithet 'Major' was first adopted by Smith in Sowerby's English Botany 36: t. 2542, published in 1814, identifying the tree as Ulmus major. Krüssmann formally recognized the tree as the cultivar U. × hollandica 'Major' in 1962.[5]
Richens (1983) states that Elwes and Henry in their account of Dutch Elm (1913) "confused Dutch Elm with English".[6] He gives no evidence but can only have been referring to Henry's statement that "in many districts ['Major'] is the commonest tree in hedgerows".[7] Richens was writing seventy years after Henry, after a Dutch elm disease epidemic, two world wars, and decades of urbanisation and road-widening. Henry's statement was not necessarily a case of misidentification – or an exaggeration. Elwes and Henry's account of Dutch Elm remains a pioneering one.[8]