Country Life
Year of the elms
Peter Quince
It is proving a remarkable year for the elms in my part of England, one of those occasional season when these trees produce flowers and then seed in great abundance. This is not without its melancholy undertone, when one thinks of what disease is doing to reduce the number of elms in the countryside. Still, no casualties have been reported so far in this locality, and meanwhile the elms have been putting on a splendid
display.
Every tree (and the elm is probably the most common kind of tree here) has been halfsmothered in the fruit, which takes the form of an oval disc, yellowish-green and translucent, about half an inch in diameter and with a blob of orange in the centre. At a glance an elm bearing such masses of these fruits as have developed this spring could easily be taken for a tree in leaf. But in fact it is only now that the seeds are being scattered far and wide over the ground that the darker green leaves have appeared.
The elm is not so late to come into leaf as the ash, which is at last beginning to show signs of life on its bare branches. Our ash tree has more than once been taken for dead in May because of this habit of being almost the last tree in the landscape to produce leaves. It is an odd characteristic in a tree which is so hardy and so well equipped to cope with the rigours of our climate. Comparative newcomers to these islands, such as the horse-chestnuts, are fully green before the ash has made any visible concession to the spring. That other sturdy native, the oak, is also inclined to be slow off the mark, although not so slow as the ash. Its buds do not break until May, at the same time as the flowering; hence the marvellous soft greens which the oaks con tribute to the landscape at this time, before the colours darken as the summer progresses.
Of all these familiar trees the elms have been most cons picuously at their best this year. The tree has always been a favourite for planting in this country, but not primarily because of its beauty. Elm timber was formerly of the greatest importance for all sorts of uses. The wooden battleships of old England were by no means all oak, but contained much elm as well, since this wood is both very strong and also remarkably durable in water. On shore, it was much used for making drain pipes because of this latter quality (and even in the nineteenth century there were still hundreds of miles of wooden water pipes in London alone: there used to be a factory for their manufacture near Fleet Street).
At the time of the Enclosures, when much of the tree-planting which still benefits the English landscape was undertaken, elm was a popular choice. One of the principal reasons for the immense amount of planting which took place then lay in the high cost of the enclosure procedure, which put a heavy burden on landowners even though they were doing well out of enclosure in the longer term; they looked to timber as a way of recouping some of their costs. Oak, ash and elm were the usual choices, each having a high commercial value as timber. The trouble with oak was that it took so long ("three hundred years growing, three hundred years standing still, and three hundred years dying", according to the old saying). Ash was also much in demand and is quicker, but it improverishes the ground beneath it. Elm grows quickly, will permit good grass to grow close up to its trunk, and fetched a high price.
Now many of the elms are disappearing because of the disease. But at least this spring they have looked at their very best.
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