American Elms (Ulmus americanus)
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My early childhood spent playing on the lawn with dogs, and with daydreams, was overseen by tall, swaying elms. I used to lay on my back and looked up to where their crowns almost met, at the always-blue Colorado sky. I knew their trunks as individuals that I can still see. The one nearest the back steps had an inverted V scar that wept sap on its west side. It occasionally shed a limb onto the roof, worrying my father. The one by the swings, with phlox growing under it, was small and slender with bark almost black. My father said it was a different species. For awhile, there was a washing line tied to it. The biggest one grew in the corner by the alley and seemed a giant to me. There were three more along the side of the yard by the street. Neatly spaced and similarly proportioned, they stood like brothers.
Elms ringed the whole house. They were responsible for keeping it cool in summer. In return, we watered our shaggy, eccentric, old-fashioned lawn, and the elms drank, too.
Near the driveway there was an old crone of a mulberry, making it risky to hang out washing or park cars when the berries were in season, because the birds shat a loose profusion of violet emulsion everywhere until the mulberries were gone. We never ate them.
Elms ringed the whole house. They were responsible for keeping it cool in summer. In return, we watered our shaggy, eccentric, old-fashioned lawn, and the elms drank, too.
Near the driveway there was an old crone of a mulberry, making it risky to hang out washing or park cars when the berries were in season, because the birds shat a loose profusion of violet emulsion everywhere until the mulberries were gone. We never ate them.
Further out, toward the vegetable garden there were more elms, but they were wild, unkempt, brushy things with crooked branches. I had a tyre on a rope on one big horizontal branch which my father pronounced safe enough. Overlooking our little plum orchard there was a climbable one, although not being an athletic child I never got very high. When my pet turtle died my mother helped me bury it under that tree, in a tin box. Sometime later I secretly dug it up to see what had happened. It was red as rust, like the box. The climbing tree was my witness.
When the plums came ripe at the end of the summer my father and I picked them, filling buckets and baskets and bowls, and stuffing ourselves all day long. It must have been the perfect environment for them, because the only care they got was water. I don't remember anyone making jam or drying them. I think we just ate as many as we possibly could and gave the rest away. The cherries were a different story. I think there were two trees, maybe three. They produced something we called Black Rag cherries. They were seriously sour, which I considered a major disappointment, but my mother would be in a flurry of excitment, because she used them to make cherry pies.
My mother was a legend in her own mind at making cherry pie. We put the cherries through a mechanical cherry pitter which screwed to the kitchen table, and you turned a crank. What didn't go into pies then were frozen for more pies later. I've never liked fruit pie. They say my mother's pastry was first class, but I didn't care for that dry, flaky stuff. Still, it was a few days of diversion and I thanked the gods of the supermarket that we could go there and get some nice sweet cherries that could be eaten fresh, and not wasted in pie.
| Half our house was heated by an ancient furnace in the basement. The other half, built by my father and his friend, was heated by a fireplace that opened into two rooms, which we called dens. A family of three people, with three different rooms to sit in. That was us in a nutshell. We each needed our space. There were sofas and TVs and bookshelves everywhere. I always managed to get a seat by the fire, and so by the time I was eight or nine I tended it. Cleaned the grate, took out the ashes, carried wood, built the fire and kept it going. To this day, when I don't have a fire to tend I miss doing it. |  |
It was under the wild elms that I used to help my father cut firewood. As well as a good supply of fallen elm branches, he had a collection of massive pieces of cottonwood (the other main local tree) which we would try to split with metal wedges and big hammers. We had hand saws for cutting the elm branches. It was hard going, but I worked my apprenticeship from gathering and breaking kindling to carrying and stacking, taking one end of the two-man saw, through to solo sawing and taking the odd swing at those wedges with the hammer. Usually, we talk about the combined ages of two people working together, but in my father's case, I think you would need to subtract my age from his to really understand the situation. As I grew, and could do more, he was able to subtract my years from his own age, and continue cutting as much wood as he could at fifty, which was his age when I was born. At ten, I could take ten years off his fatigue level. At eighteen I left home, and when I came back for a visit, my father had bought his first chain saw.
So I've made it this far without mentioning the dreaded Dutch elm disease. I've always felt that it's unfair to define an entire genus of trees by a disease. Yes, Dutch elm disease has killed countless trees in Europe and North America, but plenty have survived, and people's unwillingness to plant them, or even tolerate them, has also contributed to their absence from the modern landscape. Since the 1920s, programmes in many countries have been working to finding resistant trees in the existing population as well as breeding new varieties with resistance. No elm tree is completely immune to Dutch elm disease, as far as we know, but there are beautiful and resistant varieties available in the US and in Britain.
 English Elms (Ulmus procera) |  Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra) |
It's also very likely that although there has been a surge in problems with the disease since the 1920s, it has always existed. Historically, there are reports of what sounds like the disease in the 17th and 19th centuries in England. Looking back much further, we know that there were big declines in elm populations in NW Europe around 4,000 BC and 1,000 BC. The first decline has been blamed on neolithic farmers, who probably were partly responsible, because they cleared land for agriculture, and also coppiced elms for animal feed. However, it appears that some form of the same disease we see today was also partly responsible. Perhaps the disease is in some way cyclical. Maybe it is more prevalent when elm trees become too numerous and crowded in an area. Maybe human activity has played a part, too, by moving the diseased wood around, by overplanting in the historical period (especially the 19th and 20th centuries), not to mention the added stresses that industrialisation and intensive agriculture put on nature.
Siberian Elm (Ulmus pumila) in Colorado In the area where I grew up, the Siberian elm (often wrongly called the Chinese elm) has become very common. It is now listed as an invasive species in many parts of the southwestern US, and there is no doubt that is has changed the landscape of plains and semi-desert areas, which are not known for large trees outside of riparian belts. Siberian elms are fast growing and extremely drought resistant, and these are the reasons that they were originally planted for shade around houses and along city streets. These are the same reasons that they are now considered to be invasive. Because they are extremely deep and wide rooted, Siberian elms find enough water to survive where few native trees can. This also means that they cause a lot of problems with underground water pipes, septic systems and the like. Most elms are a bit brittle and tend to shed limbs in storms, and Siberian elms are a bit worse than most. These facts, coupled with the huge number of little seed pods they shed in spring (think pale green snow) have earned them the derisive name of "junk trees". However, especially with climate change making shade and tree respiration more desireable than ever, biologists are beginning to suggest that maybe they are not so bad after all. And that green snow, it turns out, is pretty good in salads.
As a child, it never occurred to me that all this tree politics was going on, and when I did get to hear about it, it made me sad. I'd never doubted that trees were persons. I had relationships with them. Not "I shall now sit down and commune with this tree-being" type relationships, just unselfconscious relationships that happen when you spend a lot of time with another living being. That's still how I feel about trees today, and I still love elms.
 Land Songs is a collection of eleven poems each touching on the spirit of the land. Enjoyable and challenging by turns. Love letters, eulogies, rants . . .  |  |
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