Along my suburban neighborhood walking pathway, this early October day, I was affronted by an unpleasant sight. A home lot which was once graced with a rare, one hundred-fifty year old American Elm. I admired it every walking day. It rose over the peaked roof of a lovely home only a week ago, but this day it was gone. In its place, only a pile of sawdust remained from which protruded the crudely amputated stump of the once magnificent and rare native tree. The once lovely home looked stark and barren.
The American Elm (Ulmus americana) is a tall (80 plus feet) with graceful sprays of leafy branches, they spread into a wide canopy then arch downward making it one of the most beloved specimen trees in the forest. Its downward arching branches attract the gold and black Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula) a weaver bird that built their intricate nests on the terminal branches upon which to hang its nest. The tree was once common in American forests from the Mississippi River east to northern Maine and south to central Florida. It has a wide range of habitats and is a hardy tree which can grow in a variety of soils and in colder zones (even to -40F) within it natural range.
Elm trees were common in my childhood home in Brooklyn, NY, where they were planted widely as a favored street-tree. I can remember as a boy walking along an urban, tree lined, street where tall and wide-branching Elms wove together high up over the black asphalt roadway, closing off the sky. And thus where a young lad might imagine himself— not in the man made angular world of steel, glass and concrete, but in a distant forest. That is as long as he persisted to keep his eyes turned upward —(but a dangerous way to walk on a city street).
When I was only ten years or so, and still capable of childhood fantasy, sadly, the lovely Elms began to die off one by one. Dutch Elm Disease—a fungus imported from some far away place—turned each one from graceful green, with lovely lanceolate deep-toothed leaves—-into dead stiff wood. No leaves in summer and no nesting weaver birds, clinging to globular nests which glide in breezes on thin down turned branches .
Plant pathologists who study these things claim that only one tree (1) in every hundred thousand (100,000) trees was resistant to the deadly Dutch Elm tree fungus. I suspect that my neighbor’s tree was one of these..rare ones. It was the only American Elm in our local area.
The new patch of lawn and a few low bushes were planted in place of this magnificent, rare and threatened tree…But no one knows, or it seems—-cares. It was only a tree to those city bred folks
0 …are they really that wise or special?
