07/09/2025
Wych Elm of The Glenmorrie
THE TREES of GLENMORRIE
In the late 1800s Parker Farnsworth Morey, then president of the Portland General Electric Company, purchased six hundred forty acres between the Bullock claim (Marylhurst University) and Sucker Creek - comprising the present Glenmorrie neighborhood - for a country home and farm.
Mary Goodall, in her 1958 book Oregon's Iron Dream, noted that...
Mr. Morey built an estate which included orchards of fruit and nut trees, some wild land, and park-like settings with footpaths and roadways. Morey hired English landscape gardener John Gower to supervise a staff of gardeners and laborers who planted imported trees such as Giant Sequoia, Magnolia, Tamarack, English Holly, Hawthorne,
- Cryptomeria, Empress Tree, and Camperdown Elm. In addition, they preserved and nurtured selected native® Douglas Fir, White Fir, Western Red Cedar, Western Dogwood, Oregon Maple, Hemlock, Port Orford Cedat, and Red Alder.
John C. Kuhns, in his 1960s writings as President of the Glenmorrie Cooperative Association (today's
Glenmorrie Water District), told us that...
Access to the Morey estate was by the old river road, before the bridge over Sucker Creek at the iron furnace was washed out. A more popular route was by boat on the Willamette River. From a boat landing ... a tree-bordered road followed a small creek, then across a stone bridge up past the barns northerly and over another bridge up to the manor house. The original mansion was destroyed by fire; the barns are long gone ....
Today's residents of Glenmorrie perpetuate Mr. Morey's legacy - the love of trees - as they too nurture many native and imported trees located in Glenmorrie.
This image is of the Ulmus glabra 'Camperdownii', Camperdown Elm Leaves aka Wych Elm, it is close-up and backlit. Taken in Oregon on the Glenmorrie estate in June 2023.
The grafted Camperdown Elm slowly develops a broad, flat head that may eventually build as high as 4 m (13 feet), and a commensurately wide crown with a weeping habit.
Its chief diagnostic feature is its contorted branching, what Mitchell (1982) called the "head of furiously twisting branches".
The ultimate size and form of 'Camperdownii' depends on such factors as latitude and location, on what part of the parent tree the cuttings come from, on the 'stock' on which it is grafted, and on possible continuing mutation. Specimens may therefore vary in appearance.
Grown in lower latitudes like Victoria, Australia, the tree can attain a height and spread of over 13 m.
The tree is sometimes confused with the 'Horizontalis' (Weeping Wych Elm) owing to both being given the epithet 'Pendula'
Photograph by Michele Gandee
