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Requiem for an Elm

By Robert E. Murphy


Reprinted from Brooklyn: A Magazine of the Other City, copyright 1988 by Brooklyn Union Gas.

Elms in Prospect Park have long been sources of special lore. Marianne Moore, Brooklyn's finest poet after Whitman, composed a verse about one of them, the squat, outreaching Camperdown elm beside the Boathouse, a precious oddity since Mr. A.G. Burgess presented it to Prospect Park in 1872. "Our crowning curio," Miss Moore called it, bringing attention to its need for special care. "Mortal though."

No one in Brooklyn knows more or feels stronger about the mortality of elms than M. M. Graff, "incomparable Mrs. Graff" in Marianne Moore's miniature inscription in a volume of her poems. Mrs. Graff also knows and has written sharply about hornbeams and hickories, gingkos and osage oranges, about roses and alpine plants and ground-covering shrubs. A self-trained horticulturist and tree-care expert, her late-blooming affection for Prospect Park and Central Park has provided suitable subjects for her verbal powers of instruction and destruction.

In Tree Trails in Prospect Park, a booklet published in 1968, she recorded the salvation of the Camperdown elm and the establishment of the Camperdown Fund for the treatment of this and other valuable trees, but she cautioned against voracious Dutch elm disease and the inadequate care for another elm, an American species more than three hundred years old, just across the Lullwater from the Camperdown:

Elms have extremely shallow root systems which are especially vulnerable to injury from compacted soil. A temporary fence and mulching would loosen the soil, admit air and water, and encourage the growth of new feeding roots.

Within a decade this oldest tree in Prospect Park was dead.

"It died of abuse," M. M. Graff says now. "No one ever put a fence around it and fed it compost. And New York Philharmonic trucks parked on its exposed roots."

Through the 1970s Mrs. Graff, supported by a private donation, rode through Central Park in the back of an arborist's truck, spotting and directing the pruning of elms that revealed the early signs of infestation to her uncannily discerning eye. She was nearing 70 then and is 79 today [1988], still pronouncing clearly what she has stated repeatedly in print for the past 20 years: Dutch elm disease can only be prevented when trees are properly pruned and sprayed, and can only be arrested in a given tree when it is detected early. When the offending beetles have advanced beyond remedy, the tree must be razed and burned before they hop to the next available host.

In 1985 M. M. Graff wrote of two "rare" and "thriving American elms" on Prospect Park's Long Meadow:

The first elm stands in the middle of the meadow where it takes a turn around a small moraine; the second . . . is slightly southeast of the Picnic House. By many it is considered to be the most beautiful tree in Prospect Park, partly because it has had room to reach its full magnificent spread without competition from lesser trees.

In the summer of 1987, the second elm, the one called most beautiful, died of Dutch elm disease.


As her eighth decade closes, M. M. "Dicky" Graff, a smallish, gray-haired, bright-eyed woman, is still lively in spurts, but can no longer make regular visits to the two great landscaped parks she has studied and illuminated during the most recent quarter of her life. As a child of eight her front leg muscles were badly damaged in a motor accident, but till lately she had walked defiantly and widely. Now she carries a cane when she steps out from her third-floor apartment on the border of Sunset Park, though it seems to serve more as a hedge against fatigue than a required aid to locomotion. She has never driven a car, and subway steps have become unmanageable. Until last year she was vigorously involved in the Friends of Prospect Park's effort to restore the ragged Vale of Cashmere, but, ever independent, principled and contentious, she has parted from that group. So she had not been to Prospect Park this year, and she had not heard about the latest suffering elm.

"The Picnic House elm?" she asked.

"Yes, the one you single out in your book."

The book, cited above, is Central Park, Prospect Park: A New Perspective.

"Has it got Dutch elm disease?"

This seemed quite likely.

"Well, it must be very serious if it's evident to a novice."

Dicky Graff's reflexive action in any matter that concerns her is to dash off a letter or a card on her typewriter. In this case she sent an inquiry to Brenda Corbin, Prospect Park horticulturist, who quickly and feelingly confirmed her suspicion that the problem was indeed very serious: "It is totally infected and must come out and it just makes me sick."

Dashing off a card to her original informant, Mrs. Graff couldn't find within herself much compassion for Brenda Corbin or anyone officially placed in Prospect Park:

I can't help but wonder if I could have saved the tree if I had been on a survey team and saw the earliest signs . . . It is a wry circumstance that this most treasured of elms stands (or stood) near the Environmental Center where Rangers teach concern for nature. I doubt that any of them has been instructed in early detection or even if they know how to recognize the symptoms. Nothing to do now but grieve over the loss of a particularly beautiful specimen of an endangered species.

Her grief brought her to the Long Meadow to view the remains, carrying a seasoned Praktica camera (her books include many of her own photographs) down into and up out of the glacial depression between the Picnic House and the Tennis House that has been called both "the amphitheater" and "the sugar bowl." Across from her, on the bowl's northern rim, stood the once-grand elm whose hanging, flaccid branches had waved their foliage over that hillside every summer of every living person's life. Now a few yellow leaves hopelessly delayed its permanent winter.

"Oh, that's awful," Dicky Graff moaned, holding a light meter toward the dead tree. "How could they have let it go this long? The nitwits!"


People who love Prospect Park, who appreciate it as an extraordinary feat of landscape design, who view it as a treasure of 19-century sensibility entrusted to boorish generations, are embroiled in an endless battle with the New York City Parks Department, which they accuse of being ignorant of the park's virtues. M. M. Graff will concede that some "fairly competent" people can be found there, but she is one of the most persistent and articulate accusers. She is bard and barb: the chronicler of what the park was and should be, the scold against what it has and might become. But her talent for lauding is surpassed by her special gift for lampooning: "There hasn't been a Parks Commissioner since I've been here who knew which end of a tree went into the ground."

("It is easier," she admits, "to pan than to praise. The picnic you remember is the one where Aunt Lily sat on a bee's nest and someone left the mayonnaise jar open.")

Mildred Millar Graff -- Millar is her family name -- has "been here" since 1964, when she moved alone to Brooklyn Heights after 30 years of marriage in Manhasset, Long Island, and Tenafly, New Jersey. She didn't want to live in the suburbs after her divorce because "single persons are discriminated against there; everyone goes two-by-two, like the animals in the ark." She chose Brooklyn because of her admiration for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which she had come to know as a member of the New York Horticultural Society. At the time she was planning her first book, Flowers in the Winter Garden, which had been suggested to her during her exhibits of alpine plants at the horticultural society.

"I had always had wonderful relations with the people at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden," she says, "and of course they kept an absolutely superb library. I asked them if I could work there on sunny days, and on rainy days I would stay home and write my book. They paid me the lordly sum of three dollars an hour, but it was just a marvelous release for me. When I finished the book and reread it, the second part was so light-hearted that I went back and rewrote the first part."

She had previously written pieces for gardening magazines and the New York Times, but in her book she had fully combined her lifelong inclinations to grow things and to write, inclinations that seem to be derived from opposite sides of her family:

"My mother's father and grandfather were nurserymen from England. They settled in St. Louis, where they had enormous greenhouses and grew hothouse asparagus and Parma violets. My mother said she could remember riding her pony through fields of sweet peas, and I think I got my interest in gardening from her."

Mildred Millar (pronounced "Miller" by her father, a native Scot, but accented on the second syllable by his American offspring) was born in St. David's, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, but grew up from the age of three in Forest Hills, Queens, with summers at Amagansett, after Mr. Millar became New York manager for Whitman's candy. She was named "Dicky" by her older brother, who could not pronounce "Mildred," so chose to call her what he called the family canary. Dicky Graff, whose face scrunches with displeasure at the mention of "Mildred," is grateful for the substitution.

When she reminisces about her father, her voice now and then rises to a songlike timbre.

"He was really more influential than my mother. He used to take my brother and me for walks, usually up to Forest Park, a good hike from where we lived. And [here a sung phrase] he had the most marvelous imagination. Wherever he went, something wonderful happened. One of the things we used to do was collect acorns and stuff our pockets full to feed the deer that were in a paddock of briar. Then on the way back there was a little opening or glade with some low-branched dogwoods in it, and we would walk around there and find an apple growing in the crotch of a dogwood tree. This was perfectly reasonable to us - it was just the sort of thing that happened when we were out with my father."

Dicky Graff laughs. "One time when there were no apples in the larder he got some Graham crackers and wrapped them up in wax paper and they were perfectly acceptable. There wasn't any question about it.

"But I think the most formative thing was when he would read to us when we had our supper in the nursery -- English style -- we were not allowed to come to the grown-up dinner until we were old enough not to make a mess of it or be a nuisance. And his choice was always Kipling or Stevenson or some other English book. So I think I learned from hearing him the rhythm of the English sentence and probably a fairly large vocabulary as well."

So, too, she later majored in English at Mt. Holyoke College and was accepted in the honors program for writing. Not long after graduation she married (in " '32 or '33" - she has trouble with dates, but remembers that her son and daughter were born in '38 and '40). Her writing then was mainly limited to letters, in which she has shared her adventures through the years -"color-enhanced, as a way of preserving events" - with certain selected recipients: her physician and his wife, some housebound elderly friends, including Marianne Moore; a man on Long Island whose wife was so jealous that the letters had to be directed to his post office. Letters vivify her enthusiasms. A decade or so ago a young writer who had praised the beauty and lamented the abuse of Prospect Park in a Brooklyn newspaper received not only a grateful and edifying four-page response but a subscription payment to the paper "by way of tangible applause." Lately she has taken to typing political letters, such as those exhorting U.S. Senators to vote against confirmation of "that monster" Robert Bork. Her phone bill, she reports, is usually just a few dollars a month, and she regularly receives suggestions from the phone company that she take advantage of their low-usage rates.

Soon after arriving in Brooklyn she joined the Brooklyn Camera Club, where her interest in producing "well composed, recognizable pictures" clashed with the prevailing emphasis on blurred images and "mood shots." But one evening a fellow named Bob Makla did gain her interest when he presented to the club a slide show on Prospect Park.

"I don't think I'd ever even been in the park," she says, "except maybe once when I made a wrong turn on the way to the Botanic Garden."

But she had worked closely with a landscape architect who had improved a wooded section of her property in Tenafly. So the magnificent but neglected landscape of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted was a good bet to become one of her enthusiasms.

"Bob Makla was very eloquent, and his pictures showed the beauty of the park. I was hooked immediately."

Makla, a founder of the Friends of Prospect Park, has hooked a lot of people, particularly during park tours that he began conducting in the 1960s. His elegant voice amplified by an electronic megaphone, he has the gift of exciting even inveterate park-goers by revealing hidden aesthetic and historical distinctions. "He's a magician," says Dicky Graff. "He can even misidentify a tree with the greatest conviction."

Another Friends of Prospect Park founder, architectural historian Clay Lancaster, wrote in his Prospect Park Handbook, published in 1972, that "Prospect Park is no less a masterpiece than a landscape by Kuo Hsi, Pieter Brueghel, or George Inness." Such a statement would have seemed bold, almost mad, a decade or two earlier; when local street gangs were battling on one end of the meadow and the Parks Department was leveling the other end to install baseball diamonds and brick-and-concrete grandstands. In 1964 the same agency had drawn a plan to demolish the 1905 Boathouse, a splendid Helmle and Huberty design derived from 16th-century Venice.

News of that plan rang an alarm among Prospect Park's admirers, and their organized outrage coincided with the enthusiasm gathering as the park's 1966 centennial approached. They established the Greensward Foundation to support the preservation and restoration of both Prospect and Central Parks, and in turn founded the Friends of Prospect Park, the Friends of Central Park, and the Camperdown Fund, directed by M. M. Graff, to provide special care for special trees.


Eighteen eighty-six was the year that Olmsted and Vaux were authorized to proceed with their plan for Prospect Park. They had become partners in 1858 when their "Greensward" plan was accepted by the Central Park commissioners and eclipsed an earlier design by a road engineer named Eghert Viele. The poobahs of the city of Brooklyn, led by the civic-minded millionaire James S.T. Stranahan, looked across the river with envy and decided they wanted a park as good or better of their own. In 1865 Stranahan wrote that the Brooklyn park would be not only "a favorite resort for all classes," but would "hold out strong inducements to the affluent to remain in our city, who are now too often induced to change their residences by the seductive influences of the New York Park."

When it was finished in 1873 he got a natural enclosure that is almost universally considered a finer product than Central Park. Despite being less than two-thirds of Central Park's area, Prospect Park's thicker shape was better suited to Olmsted and Vaux's principal purpose of removing its visitors from the clamor and turmoil of the city streets. Within its boundaries the designers could create more effectively the illusion of the countryside, could turn a walker from glade to woodland to glade to waterway in such a way that he would seem to be traveling longitudinally much farther than he was. Olmsted the social meliorist and Vaux the visual artist took care that every foot of the park, every planting, bridge and shelter participated in their eye-seducing scheme, helped "calm the rougher edges" of the people, as they stated in a report to the commissioners. Together and apart they went on from Brooklyn to design public and private grounds throughout the eastern half of the country, but it is doubtful that they ever did better work. When Olmsted took a walk through Prospect Park in the late 1880s he remarked that he was "prouder of it than anything I've had to do with."

Olmsted had of course not done it alone - had not, it turns out, been even the primary achiever. But having been a democratic philosopher, an avid writer, and a more forceful personality than Vaux, it is Olmsted's name that has endured in public memory and is most often attributed authorship of Central and Prospect Parks. Just a year or two ago, when the Prospect Park ball fields were being rearranged in a sincere if categorically inadequate attempt to mitigate their intrusion on the southwest end of Long Meadow, the Parks Department hung a sign to explain its purpose as being to reconstruct the area so that it would be more in accordance with the plan "of Frederick Law Olmsted."

When M. M. Graff first began to write about the parks, in the Friends of the Parks publication A Little News, in the booklet Tree Trails in Prospect Park and the book Tree Trails in Central Park, she admits that she, too, was given to crediting Olmsted alone. But she has since gone to school on the subject, most thoroughly in preparation for Central Park, Prospect Park: A New Perspective, and has emerged with a withering assessment of Olmsted's qualifications. Her "new perspective" is delivered forthrightly in the book's first paragraph:

"The creators of Central Park were visionaries endowed with the highest order of artistry and dedication. The prime movers were William Cullen Bryant and Andrew Jackson Downing. Calvert Vaux, Jacob Wrey Mould, Ignaz Pilat, Andrew Haswell Green and Samuel Parsons, Jr. provided the professional experience needed to transform a fetid swamp into a pastoral landscape.... Their eclipse came about through an unforeseen circumstance: a thirty-five-year-old part-time farmer, Frederick Law Olmsted, found his future vocation while working as superintendent of labor on the park site and ultimately rose to national fame.

Her picture of Olmsted till that age, drawn with characteristic acerbity, is of a dilettante and family disappointment; whereas the Englishman Vaux had been properly trained in architecture and landscape drawing. Clearly the two men worked together on the Greensward plan, but Vaux's superior knowledge and ability indicate that he was "he park's chief designer."

This conclusion caused general fluttering in Manhattan's Olmstedian dovecote.

"The head of the Committee for Olmsted Parks was furious at me," she recalls. "He said to me, You'll be attacking Christ next!"'

In Brooklyn the evidence for Vaux's primacy is even clearer. Dicky Graff possesses a Library of Congress photo print of a January 1865 letter from Vaux to Olmsted in California, accompanied by a preliminary sketch of Prospect Park that significantly altered an earlier proposal by the same unfortunate Egbert Viele whom the masters had supplanted in Central Park. Olmsted did not return from the West, where he was involved in a mining project, until the following November, less than a month before the formal plan for Prospect Park was due.

Of those who continue to speak of "Olmsted's Prospect Park," wrote M. M. Graff, "Their slogan will be that of James Thurber's ironbound character: 'Mere proof won't convince me.' "

Central Park, Prospect Park: A New Perspective is her first book since Flowers in the Winter Garden that she has written without a collaborator. Her involvement in Tree Trails in Prospect Park, in fact, came about as a sort of a rescue mission for Brooklyn Botanic Garden taxonomist George Kaimbacher, a man she remembers fondly and credits for teaching her much of what she knows about trees, but who was quickly lost in a forest of words when he attempted to record what he knew. Kaimbacher also assisted her on Tree Trails in Central Park, and the geologist Thomas Hanley later provided the scholarship for Rock Trails in Central Park. When she wrote a book with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden rosarian, she graciously consented to the title Peter Malins' Rose Book. But in this as in the other works the words are inimitably hers.

In Dicky Graff's own copy of Central Park, Prospect Park are inserted some photocopied pages of a June 22, 1987 New Yorker in which Tony Hiss discusses Prospect Park, or in particular the experience of entering the park on the path beside the Stranahan statue at Grand Army Plaza, through the Endale Arch, and toward the astonishing broadness and brightness of Long Meadow. In her view this description is a plagiarism from her book, and she has written repeatedly to the New Yorker's editor demanding that the source be acknowledged. She has got no response, but then perhaps the battle itself matters most. Dicky warms to battles. She is bristling, in fact, about the way in which the book, published by the Greensward Foundation, has been handled, insisting that there are thousands of copies "sitting in a warehouse somewhere" and not being distributed. She has severed herself from the Friends of Prospect Park over a sum of money that remained unspent while she and others "had been working like coolies" for five or six years sweeping and weeding the Vale of Cashmere. A decade ago she was scrapping with the Parks Council, a group she calls "the do-gooder's Mafia," who had taken over the program to control Dutch elm disease in Manhattan and "queered the whole thing." Lately she has taken on the Parks Department for spending (she says) $53,000 to destroy a wildflower garden on a slope in Sunset Park by bulldozing it and planting Japanese honeysuckle, which is "frail and not dense enough to crowd out weeds." She also objects to the too-close grass cutting on the slope across from her windows: "People say, 'Oh, well, it'll grow back,' and I say, 'Well, why don't you shave your head? Your hair will grow back, too.' "

Still, she cherishes her view of little Sunset Park, "especially in the late afternoon when the sun is shining up the lawn and it looks like the Seurat painting 'Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.' " Since she has also had battles with landlords, her top-floor apartment in a limestone row house is her most recent of several Brooklyn addresses. It contains a small bedroom and a like-sized kitchen. The front room that looks onto the park is her sitting room; the back room, whose book-and-paper-strewn condition she needlessly apologizes for, is her workplace. Alas, she has no garden, but she has a plan that will both provide one and remove the recurring burden of a landlord: she is arranging to buy the house.

Sunset Park, however, is in truth a long way from la Grande Jatte. Besides children playing and flying kites she has also seen from her front windows older children buying and smoking crack. Yet she shuns fear. Not many years ago, while researching for Central Park, Prospect Park, she sallied unscathed, camera in hand, into even the most northern districts of Central Park. And, far from isolating herself from the sometimes rugged street life of her neighborhood, she is active in the Sunset Park Preservation Committee, has sold lottery chances for a music school to be located in the old Fourth Avenue police station, and has provided personal care for a vandalized elm in the park itself, including painting a section of the tree trunk where the bark had been burned away.

In the parks her policy has been to approach people before they approach her. When she revisited the Vale of Cashmere lately, she greeted two young black men gyrating though a martial-arts exercise near Nellie's Lawn, and told them, halting their activity as she did so, that their performance seemed like a dance. Pleased to be noticed, they responded that, in a way, it was a dance, gave it a name, and happily discussed the whole enterprise with her.


She had not wanted to see the Vale again. Reports had reached her that the years of toil she and other volunteers had donated to improving it had been undone in the year since they had left. In her case this had involved not only the "low labor" of clearing and cleaning it but selecting and overseeing its planting.

"We were there almost every week," she said, "and we maintained it so well that people began to respect it. They would come by and comment on how nice it looked. We had raised the public consciousness." The Vale of Cashmere, tucked away in a glacial kettle south of Grand Army Plaza on the Flatbush Avenue side of the park, was the somewhat mysterious fancy of persons other than the original designers. Olmsted, in fact, specifically objected in the 1890s to this "absurdly named" replacement for the "Children's Playground." Yet even the most dedicated park originalists admire it. It contains an elongated pool, irregularly shaped around a group of peninsulas, yet formally stone-walled and at one time rimmed with balustrades. (The balusters have disappeared, and only the punctuating posts remain.) The pool is surrounded by a red-brick walk, and the whole is enclosed in a steep-sided geological pocket, giving the visitor a sense of having entered a secret retreat.

The day that Dicky Graff went to the park to attend what she called a "requiem for an elm," and after she had recorded two more moribund examples in the vicinity and registered her complaint at the Environmental Center in the Picnic House, she gathered the fortitude to extend her walk to the Vale of Cashmere.

She cannot walk far in a verdant setting without revealing her carefully considered, vividly worded prejudices. She is the H.L. Mencken of horticulturists. She does not, for example, like London planes or Schwedler maples, both of which are well represented in New York City parks.

"Robert Moses (who was New York City parks commissioner for 30 years) knew only one tree, the London plane, and one shrub, privet."

The plane is maligned because "its leaf is coarse, its bark is undistinguished -- it doesn't seem native, though it is. It's an awkward tree. It has no foliage, no shape, no dignity."

And, like the Schwedier maple, its color is off.

"I think trees should be green. They're like men's evening clothes that offset the ladies' dresses."

(In speech and in writing, she is a master of the cogent simile: "Research is a little like wearing pretty underwear. Nobody sees it, but it's nice to know that it's there."

In the Vale she tolerates a "shrieking red" azalea on one of the peninsulas because "everybody loves it." But she feels it is "badly positioned. It looks like a fat boy riding on the back of a bus.")

There is, however, a surprise for her in the Vale of Cashmere. A mustachioed man in perhaps his late forties is removing a shovelful of weeds when she arrives there. His work has left the walk, in her exacting view, "immaculate."

Though they are strangers, she greets him, and they chat about rhododendrons. She is wearing an armor of coy superiority, like someone who once built a house talking to its subsequent owner. A knowing look comes into his eyes.

"Are you M. M. Graff?" he asks.

His name is Stan.

"Your book," he says, speaking apparently for the Friends of Prospect Park, "is our bible."

She does not seem to be flattered. But she is quite willing to indulge his brain-picking. Should the shrubs on the peninsulas be pruned or left to grow with the freedom of nature?

"They should be pruned, of course."

"Why?"

"For the same reason that you cut your hair. I use an oxymoron to describe how they should look - they should be 'artfully natural.' "

He has other inquiries. There has been a problem with rats, and he asks her to recommend a pesticide. Warfarin, she says, should do the job. (She is also in favor of reducing the squirrel population, which is unnaturally inflated by their glut of food and is a menace to the park's trees.)

After indicating that the water then flowing through an open valve into the pool has been allowed to rise too high, she begins to leave. Stan calls a parting appeal to her.

"Write another book," he says.


Dicky Graff doesn't intend to write another book. She has written all she knows about parks, she says, and at her age, having endured some health battles that have "damaged the old chassis," she had made up her mind to take on no "long-term projects." But resignation has given way to enthusiasm as she has begun to plan her new garden. It will be a landscaped garden and she will design it herself, working with the same landscape architect whom she worked with in the Vale. When it is finished she will photograph it and write an article about it.

"I am amazed by the resiliency of the human spirit." she says, glowing with the prospect of a long-term project.

She had said earlier, quoting she was not sure whom, that "old age is not for sissies." Then it should suit her as well as it apparently suited James S.T. Stranahan, "father of Prospect Park," whose statue at Grand Army Plaza is included in her brilliant critique of the sculpture of Frederick MacMonnies in Central Park, Prospect Park.

It should be remembered (she wrote) that the statue was unveiled in Stranahan's living presence so it was not in any sense a funerary monument. Stranahan died in his ninety-first year. The statue is therefore not an expression of grief but of celebration of the rich legacy given to the people of Brooklyn.

And so is this a celebration of what M. M. Graff has given her adopted hometown.


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