see it clearly
Elm Tree
Among the most characteristically English trees, the Common Elm has yet but dubious claims to an existence in this country prior to the Roman occupation, even if its introduction date back as far as that. The name is but slightly altered from the Latin ulmus, though still less so from the German form Ulme, whilst but few of our townships take their names from this tree, compared with the number called after the Oak, Yew, or Holly. It is urged, moreover, that the Common Elm seldom ripens its seed in this country, multiplying itself, unlike the Wych Elm, by means of suckers. Its tufts of small flowers, often conspicuous with red or purple anthers on the bare boughs in the middle of leafless March, succeeded by the clusters of pale green "samaras," as the botanists term the flat-winged fruits, might well make us lay the blame of the absence of ripe seed on our climate, as being unnatural to the Elm. It is, however, no exceptional circumstance that this species should not ripen its seed in England, for it seldom does so in any part of Europe or Asia, though the numerous seedling varieties that have been raised by our nurserymen bear witness to the fact that it does occasionally ripen a few seeds.
Native or not native, the "hedge-row Elms" now form a leading feature in most of our southern and midland landscapes, in the avenues of our parks, or scattered over them in clumps; stripped of their lower boughs on the margins of our corn-fields; clipped close so as to contribute to the hedge itself; or in the venerable grandeur of unmolested beauty, as the historic tree on some village green.
The Elms, with three or four other genera, are separated off from the great group of catkin-bearing forest trees to form a distinct natural order, the Ulmacea. They are confined to the north temperate zone, and of the genus Ulmus there are rather more than a dozen forms admitted to rank as species. These agree in having their leaves "oblique," i.e., unequally lobed at the base, one side being larger than the other; in their tufted flowers, which are not in drooping catkins, each containing both stamens and pistils; and in the enclosed ovary having two chambers, though the winged fruit which results therefore has commonly only one chamber with one seed in it. The position of this seed-chamber in the elliptical fruit furnishes the distinguishing characters of our British Elms: in the Common Elm (Ulmus campestris) it is above the center, and near to the little notch at the top of the samara; whilst in the Wych Elm (U. montana) it is below the center. When, however, instead of poring over dried specimens in the herbarium, we visit the living tree, we see at once many other features that clearly impress us with the individuality of several different forms.
When seen at its best the Elm is a very large tree, even exceeding 120 feet in height, and 40 or 50 feet in girth, though seldom over 100 feet high or 30 feet round; often sending out one or two huge horizontal limbs to a distance of thirty or forty feet from the trunk, and generally forking above into ascending branches, whose multitudinous branchlets and twigs form a rounded top, towering over the green billowy masses that spring from the limbs. Its bark is corky, gray in color, and scored by those grand vertical furrows of age that mark the expanding rings of wood within, and have earned for the tree the epithet of "rugged." When bare of leaves, and standing black against a dull wintry sky, the tiny twiglets on the topmost boughs appear as delicate lace-work, far exceeding in fineness the minutest ornament of the Gothic architect, and yet graduating downwards into mighty beams, so as to suggest at once the strength of Nature's framework and the delicacy of her finish.
In England, the Common Elm is most abundant to the south of the Trent, and in this district almost every neighborhood has its famous old Elm, celebrated for age and size, beside a roadside inn, or associated with the good Queer Bess or some other historic character. In the home-meadow of an old English grange the row of Elms will generally be clamorous with the hoarse voices of rooks, who are seen in spring deftly arranging the dead twigs of winter to form those homes which, when deserted, wave among the bare branches like blots upon the sky. The Elm is not particular as to soil, but flourishes best in a deep clayey loam in sheltered valleys. In sand or gravel its roots spread horizontally near the surface of the ground, their ends watered by the drippings from its long limbs, and they are thus liable, not only to be laid bare by the removal of the surface soil through the action of the rain--for which, covering themselves with a thick corky rind, they care little--but also to cause, through their loose hold in the earth, the overthrow of the whole tree. Another misfortune to which the Elm is peculiarly liable is the loss of its large horizontal limbs, which, though sometimes attributable to the action of frost, seems often only to be accounted for by supposing that they have elongated themselves, regardless of gravitation, beyond the cohesive power of their woody tissue; unless, indeed, we adopt the squirrel's explanation in Mr. Jefferies' charming fable, "Wood Magic":
"Elms are very treacherous, and I recommend you to have nothing to do with them, dear."
"But how could he hurt me?" said Bevis.
"He can wait till you go under him," said the squirrel, "and then drop that big bough on you. He has had that bough waiting to drop on somebody for quite ten years. Just look up and see how thick it is, and heavy; why, it would smash a man out flat. Now, the reason the Elms are so dangerous is because they will wait so long till somebody passes. Trees can do a great deal, I can tell you: why, I have known a tree, when it could not drop a bough, fall down altogether when there was not a breath of wind nor any lightning, just to kill a cow or a sheep out of sheer bad temper."
The stems of old Elms often become distorted with huge wart-like swellings, that put out tufts of little leafy twigs, especially when branches have been removed by man or nature. The wood of these swellings is ornamentally mottled, and takes a better polish than the ordinary timber of the tree, and is therefore valued for veneering. In France the trees are sometimes lopped on purpose to produce these knots. The chief insect foes of the Elm are the caterpillar of the Goat-moth (Cossus ligniperda), which eats its way into the wood of this tree, as it does also into that of the Ash, Oak, Beech, Linden, Willow, Poplar, Apple, Walnut, and others, and the Elm-bark Beetle (Scolytus destructor). This latter insect pierces innumerable holes through the bark, and forms extensive branching galleries in the inner bark and young wood. The remedies suggested are paring off the older bark so as to encourage a copious flow of sap, drenching the stem for several days, by means of a garden hose, and dressing it with coal-tar or soft soap, and above all, not allowing the felled trunks of infested Elms to remain on the ground with their bark on. Far more disfiguring, however, than these defects are those caused by man's ill-treatment. In many agricultural counties the Elms may be seen trimmed, to a height of forty or fifty feet, of every bough, so that they resemble nothing in nature but an aged hollyhock or a gigantic Brussels-sprout. In this pruning the cut ends are often carelessly made, so that wet-rot and decay eat from them into the center of the stem. Even when completely hollow, a battered veteran will long retain enough vitality in its mere shell to put forth some leaves each year.
The timber of the Elm is too useful to be thus wantonly destroyed. The whole log can be used, the lighter sapwood being as durable as the brown heart, and when kept perfectly dry or completely under water it is peculiarly imperishable. Hollowed Elm-logs were formerly almost exclusively used for water-pipes, and the wood is still employed for ships' pumps, keels, and bilge-boards, as well as for chairs and furniture. When alternately wet and dry it decays rapidly; and thus, in the use to which the greatest quantity is now put, to form our last resting-places on earth, it soon returns our dust to that whence we were taken.
It is remarkable that, beyond a few casual allusions, the Elm has attracted but little attention from our poets; and to Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton it is but "the vineprop elm" of Virgil's Italian vineyards. On the other hand, though they refer mainly to another species, the following passages from "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" are too characteristic both of the tree and of the writer to be omitted.
"I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular. Now, if you expect me to hold forth in a 'scientific' way about my tree-loves--to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that, you are an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who will discourse to you of such matters. . . . Who cares how many stamens or pistils that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual. . . . I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston Elm. I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. . . . I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came over it, as over a betrothed maiden when she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted. Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself. All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's fingers, of one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions. As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of my journey, the rounded tops of the Elms arose from time to time at the roadside. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest I asked myself--'Is this it?' But as I drew nearer they grew smaller--or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line had looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it--I declare it makes my flesh creep when I think of it now--all at once I saw a great green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering the words, 'This is it!' . . . What makes a first-class Elm? Why, size in the first place, and chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim, that title, according to my scale. . . .Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen feet, are comparatively common. . . . The American Elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if from languor. The English Elm is compact, robust, holds its branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own native tree. Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the ocean, or not?"