Chichester Elm

Ulmus × hollandica cultivar
Chichester Elms, Queens' College, Cambridge
Hybrid parentage	U. glabra × U. minor
Cultivar	'Vegeta' ('Cicestria')
Origin	England

The hybrid cultivar Chichester Elm was cloned at the beginning of the 18th century from a tree growing at Chichester Hall, Rawreth, near Danbury, Essex, England, then the home of Thomas Holt White FRS, brother of the naturalist Gilbert White. It is the original Ulmus × hollandica 'Vegeta' (Lindley, Hortus Cantabrigiensis, 1823), but suffered confusion with the later Huntingdon Elm hybrid by John Claudius Loudon, to which he also accorded the epithet 'Vegeta' as he found the two cultivars indistinguishable. Chichester Elm appeared as U. cicestria in an 1801 catalogue (see Synonymy below).

A very tall tree, with foliage similar to that of the Huntingdon Elm. The Rev. Adam Buddle originally identified the tree as 'a broad-leaved smooth Wych Elm' that grew 'plentifully about Danbury'.

Chichester Elm leaves, Queens' College, Cambridge, November

From same trees. Length 5 to 6 in. from petiole-end to leaf-tip, width 2.5 to 3 in.

The tree is susceptible to Dutch elm disease. Its Danbury-area provenance puts it in the Dengie elm group, considered by Oliver Rackham (1986) to have some degree of resilience.

Examples of the tree were presented in 1711 by Adam Buddle to the Chelsea Physic Garden; Buddle held a living at North Fambridge, not far from Rawreth. Adam Holt, relative of Thomas Holt, distributed the elms nationwide in the 1720s. Chichester Elms were planted at Woburn Abbey in the 1730s by Thomas Holt, who was agent for the estate, and are recorded in photographs in Arboretum Woburnense (1915); they no longer survive. Chichester Elm was marketed as U. cicestria in 1801 by nurseryman George Lindley of Catton, Norwich; his 1815 catalogue lists the tree as U. Cicestriensis. Lindley's son, the eminent botanist John Lindley FRS, had worked in Cambridge as assistant to John Henslow, later Professor of Botany at the University, helping him lay out and catalogue the Cambridge University Botanic Garden. It is possible that the tree owes its Cambridge introduction to John Lindley, whose 1823 revision of Donn's (d. 1813) Hortus Cantabrigiensis contains the first reference, bestowed by him, to the Chichester Elm as U. vegeta.