Along my suburban neighborhood walking path, this early October day, I was affronted by an unpleasant sight. A neighbor’s home, once graced with a rare, one-hundred-fifty year old American Elm, I admired every walking day, had been cut down. Just last week it rose over the peaked roof of its lovely home, today its leaf-dappled shade was gone. In its place, only a pile of raw sawdust, from which protruded the crudely amputated stump of a once magnificent native tree. Its gentle shape and soft foliage gone, the home poked up angularly out of its low hill, stark and barren.
The American Elm (Ulmus americana) is a tall (80 plus feet) tree with with lovely lanceolate deep-toothed leaves and graceful sprays of leafy branches that spread into a tall, wide canopy, then arch downward making it one of the most graceful specimen-trees of the eastern forests. The flash of black and orange among these hanging branches is often that of the Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula), for the low dangling branches attract these birds which build incredibly complex pouch-like nests of plant fibers on the tips of terminal branches to protect their young from climbing predators. The tree was once common in American forests from the Mississippi River east to northern Maine and south to central Florida. In those pe 1950 days it was found in 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.
In many US cities and in my childhood residence of Brooklyn, NY, Elm trees were common street plantings. I can remember as a boy walking along an urban, tree-lined, street where tall and wide-branching Elms wove their branches together high up over the black asphalt roadway, almost closing off the sky. And thus where a young lad might imagine himself— not in the bustling man-made angular world of steel, glass and concrete, but walking on a far-off forest path. That is as long as he persisted keeping his eyes turned upward —(—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, into stiff and barren, deadwood. There were no green sky shading leaves in summer and no nesting weaver birds, clinging to globular nests which glide in summer breezes on thin, down-turned branches .
Plant pathologists who study these things claim that only one tree (1) in every hundred thousand (100,000) was resistant to the deadly Dutch Elm tree fungus. I suspect that my neighbor’s tree was one of these..rare one in a thousand specimens. It was the only American Elm in our town.
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 “some kind of tree” to those city bred folks..who find shabby green lawns more to their taste.
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