| Ulmus minor 'Goodyeri' | |
|---|---|
 Goodyer Elm, Rockford, c. 1960 | |
| Species | Ulmus minor |
| Cultivar | 'Goodyeri' |
| Origin | Pennington, England |
The Field Elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Goodyeri', commonly known as 'Goodyer's Elm', was discovered by John Goodyer in 1624 at Pennington near the Hampshire coast between Lymington and Christchurch. [1] [2] No old specimens are known to survive, but the tree is perpetuated by numerous root suckers, notably in the lanes about the Alice Lisle public house in the New Forest hamlet of Rockford. [3] The tree has suffered misidentification in the centuries since its discovery, firstly by Philip Miller in his 'Gardeners' Dictionary' of 1731, [4] and later in the early 20th century by Augustine Henry and Marcus Woodward, who both confused the tree with Plot Elm, whose centre of distribution is in the East Midlands, some 200 miles away and of completely different appearance. [5] [6]
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Augustin Ley prepared a herbarium specimen from Goodyer's Elm (without using that name) near Lymington in 1882, calling the trees just Ulmus glabraMill.. [7] Melville rediscovered Goodyer's Elm in 1937, publishing an account of it in 1938 and describing it as a form of Cornish Elm. [1] [8] In a later paper, 'The names of the Cornish and the Jersey elm' (Kew Bulletin, 1960), he acknowledged that the suggestion that Goodyer's was a variety of Cornish had already been made by Weston in his Flora Anglicana (1775): "It is evident that by the time Weston published the Flora Anglicana he had reached the conclusion that the Cornish Elm and Goodyer's Hampshire Elm were varieties of a single species, which was distinct from U. campestris." [9]
