For the first time in many years, the northernmost section of The Green between Delaware Avenue and Main Street is again lined by 14 healthy American elm trees—including the 11 youngsters that were planted in late October as part of UD’s ongoing efforts to heed the vision of its early 20th century landscape designers.

For now, the 20- to 30-foot upstarts can’t hope to match the grandeur of the mature broad-canopy elms that once rose in two rows above the pathways, but in time, UD’s North Green will regain its shady feel and leafy vistas.

“These new trees are the ‘Princeton’ cultivar, which is more resistant to disease, and will do a lot to emphasize that historic feel,” said Sue Wyndham, UD’s landscape planner. “That’s important for UD. I feel like the campus really belongs to a lot of people.”

American elm trees first became integral to UD’s identity in 1917, when Philadelphia architect Frank Miles Day unveiled his plan for the school’s then-new central campus, an area meant to physically and symbolically join the old men’s and women’s campuses. Soon after construction of The Green’s early buildings, students helped plant the elms that lined its length, and eventually 160 of them across the campus would grow happily until the 1970s.

That’s when the elms began to fall ill, starved of food and water by a fungus carried by the elm bark beetle, an invading pest that would eventually devastate millions of trees and essentially doom the American elm. In the 1930s, before the disease took hold, there were an estimated 77 million elms in the United States. By 1989, more than 75 percent had been killed.