---
title: How a Sideways Elm in County Down Outlived the Disease That Killed Britain's Elms
description: Newcastle's Bendy Tree, a wych elm in County Down, is UK Tree of the Year 2026. Why it survived the Dutch elm disease that killed 30 million elms.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-10-22T17:26:02.120Z
updated: 2026-10-22T17:26:02.137Z
canonical: https://richtravelmagazine.com/article/bendy-tree-uk-tree-of-the-year-2026
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-a-solitary-green-tree-stands-majestically-in-a-peaceful-coun-24524482.jpg
categories: Destinations
content_type: Feature
region: Northern Ireland
publication: Rich Travel Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

On the promenade at Newcastle, County Down, the Mourne Mountains rise behind the town and the Irish Sea runs grey and restless in front of it. Halfway along the seafront, a wych elm leans so far towards the land that its trunk runs almost parallel to the path. Its crown forms a green arch over a council bench, and people sit beneath it with coffee, watching the tide come in across Dundrum Bay. Most visitors take it for a local curiosity. It is also one of the rarest things on these islands: a mature elm that is still alive.

This month the Woodland Trust named the tree, known to everyone in Newcastle as the Bendy Tree, UK Tree of the Year 2026. It took more than 30% of the public vote and became the first tree from Northern Ireland to win since the contest began in 2014. This year's theme was Against All Odds, and the elm beat nine other survivors, among them a small yew that has grown from the masonry of a Devon church tower for two centuries, a Scottish ash that survived a lightning strike, and a Surrey yew in which villagers found a cannonball from the English Civil War. May Chemais, who leads the Woodland Trust's Ancient Tree Inventory, called the winner 'astonishing and bizarre'.

The bend is the part people photograph. The more remarkable fact is that the tree is still here at all.

## The wind it was planted to stop shaped its trunk

The elm was one of a row planted along the original promenade in the 19th century to shelter the seafront from the wind coming off the sea. The other trees in the row were felled during redevelopment in the 1980s, leaving this one alone on the front. For around 150 years the same wind it was planted to block has pressed against it, and the trunk has grown away from the gusts until it lies almost flat.

Trees respond to constant mechanical stress by changing how they grow, laying down denser wood where they need support and shortening their growth on the exposed side. A tree on a sheltered lawn grows tall and upright; a tree on an exposed seafront grows like this one. The elm still does the job it was planted for, sheltering people from the weather, only now it does it from overhead.

## A disease named after a country instead of the women who found it

The danger the elm survived arrived in Europe more than a century ago. In January 1921, Dina Spierenburg, a plant pathologist at the Dutch Plant Protection Service, published a report on elms dying across the Netherlands the year before. Her distribution map showed the disease had already reached every Dutch province.

That same year Bea Schwarz, the first doctoral student of Johanna Westerdijk, isolated a fungus from the brown streaks that ran through the wood of dying trees and named it Graphium ulmi. Westerdijk ran a plant pathology laboratory in Baarn, and in 1917 she had become the first woman appointed a professor in the Netherlands. Schwarz's conclusion met a storm of criticism, and other researchers argued the cause was a bacterium. In 1928 Christine Buisman, another of Westerdijk's students, proved that Schwarz had been right.

Buisman went on to breed elms for resistance to the disease. She died in 1936, still in her thirties, and one of the resistant clones from the Dutch breeding programme was later released under her name. The disease itself took its name from the country where four women had worked out what it was.

## A beetle carries the fungus, and the tree dies of its own defences

The fungus is believed to have come from Asia, and it moves from tree to tree on the bodies of elm bark beetles. In Europe the most effective carrier is the large elm bark beetle, Scolytus scolytus. Female beetles lay their eggs under the bark of weakened or dying elms. When the young adults emerge, they carry the fungus's spores on their bodies and fly to healthy elms to feed in the crotches of young twigs, where the spores enter the tree's water-conducting vessels.

What follows is a slow betrayal. The elm tries to stop the fungus spreading by blocking its own vessels with plugs of gum and tissue. Those plugs also cut off the water supply to the crown, and in summer the leaves on infected branches wilt, curl and turn brown. In effect, the tree's defences starve it. The dying tree then becomes a breeding site for the next generation of beetles.

## The second outbreak took Britain's elms from the landscape

The first wave of the disease, which reached Britain in the 1920s, killed many trees but eventually faded. The second was far worse. In the 1960s a much more aggressive strain arrived in Britain on timber imported from North America, and over the following years it destroyed most of the country's estimated 30 million elms. Tall elms had stood in hedgerows across lowland England for centuries, and John Constable painted them into the Suffolk landscapes that still shape how many people picture the English countryside. Within a generation, most of them were gone.

The English elm suffered most because of the way it reproduces. It rarely grows from seed and instead spreads by suckers from its roots, so whole hedgerows and parishes were filled with near-identical clones. A disease that could kill one tree could kill all of them.

## Why a wych elm on a windy seafront had a better chance

The Bendy Tree is a wych elm, a different species with a different strategy. Wych elms grow from seed, which gives each tree its own genetic make-up, and the beetles that carry the disease tend to favour other elms over them. Wych elms are still killed by the disease, and many have been, but they have held on in greater numbers, particularly in the north and west of these islands.

There is an argument that geography helped this one as well. Since the 1980s it has stood alone on the front, with no neighbouring elms to pass beetles between them, and the wind that bent it makes the seafront a hard place for a small insect to fly. Nobody can prove why a particular tree escaped, and survival is not immunity. In Brighton's Preston Park, one of the Preston Twins, which is likely the oldest English elm in the world at around four centuries old, lost its twin of the same age to the disease.

## Visiting the Bendy Tree in Newcastle, County Down

Newcastle is about an hour's drive south of Belfast, at the point where the Mourne Mountains meet the sea. The tree stands on the central promenade, with the bench beneath it facing the water and the Mournes behind. On a clear day Slieve Donard, the highest mountain in Northern Ireland, is visible from the seat. Walkers can start the climb to its summit from Donard Park at the southern end of the town, and the sand dunes of Murlough National Nature Reserve lie a short drive to the north along Dundrum Bay.

The Bendy Tree will now represent the United Kingdom in the European Tree of the Year contest, with public voting due early next year. The previous UK winner was a 75-foot ash in Glasgow; this year's is a tree people can sit under, in a town where the row it once belonged to exists only in old photographs.