[1] According to Richens the tree was a native of Picardy and elsewhere in northern France, where it was known from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries as ypereau or ypreau.

[4] The epithet 'Major' was first adopted by Smith in Sowerby's English Botany 36: t. 2542, published in 1814, identifying the tree as Ulmus major.

[7] Richens was writing seventy years after Henry, after two Dutch elm disease epidemics, two world wars, and decades of urbanisation and road-widening.

[8] In areas unaffected by Dutch elm disease, 'Major' often attains a height of > 30 m, with a short bole and irregular, wide-spreading branches.

The cultivar may be distinguished from other elms by the corky ridges which on mature trees occur only on the epicormic branches of the trunk.

[12] ‘Dutch’ elm was also planted in urban parks, for example in the elm-groves of Kensington Palace Gardens,[7] and, on account of its suckering habit and quick growth,[13] was frequently planted as the elm component in mixed coastal shelter-belts on the south coast, in Cornwall, South Wales, the Isle of Man,[14][15] and East Anglia.

[7] The tree was propagated and marketed in the UK by the Hillier & Sons nursery, Winchester, Hampshire from 1949, with 101 sold in the period 1962 to 1977, when production ceased with the advent of the more virulent form of Dutch elm disease.

[7] 'Major' is known to have been marketed (as U. montana gigantea) in Poland in the 19th century by the Ulrich nursery,[19] Warsaw, and may still survive in Eastern Europe.

[26] A 2011 study by Dr Max Coleman of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, has confirmed that many thousands of mature 'Major' survive in the Isle of Man.

[24] The open, irregular branching of 'Major' appears in Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the bishop's grounds (1823),[28] and in G. N. Wright's Wellington Monument, Phoenix Park (c.1830) (see 'Cultivation').