Ulmus × hollandica 'Major'

Ulmus × hollandica cultivar
Ulmus × hollandica 'Major', Brighton, UK.
Hybrid parentage	U. glabra × U. minor
Cultivar	'Major'
Origin	northern France and Low Countries; (as cultivar) England

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'. Helen Bancroft considered 'Major' either an F2 hybrid or a backcrossing with one of its parents.

According to Richens the tree was a native of Picardy and northern France, where it was known from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries as ypereau or ypreau. 'Major' was said to have been introduced to England from the Netherlands in the late seventeenth century as a fashion-elm associated with William & Mary, the name 'Dutch Elm' having been coined by Queen Mary's resident botanist Dr Leonard Plukenet.

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.

Richens (1983) states that Elwes and Henry in their account of Dutch Elm (1913) "confused Dutch Elm with English". 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". 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.