Despite the ravages of Dutch elm disease, these once ubiquitous features of our landscape still loom large
Just as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 did not originate in Spain, so Dutch elm disease is no fault of the Netherlands. It acquired the name thanks to the pioneering efforts of three Dutch scientists – Marie Beatrice Schol-Schwarz, Christine Buisman and Johanna Westerdijk – who identified the beetle-transported fungus that causes it in the 1920s.
Nor is the so-called “English elm” (Ulmus minor) really English, inasmuch as it is thought to have been transferred here from Italy, so Reform UK party enthusiasts should probably agitate to repatriate all such specimens. More confidently thought native to these isles is the wych elm (from the Old English for “supple”) or Scots elm, which has long been thought to have healing and protective qualities.
Our scholarly guide to this noble plant, Mandy Haggith, delves enthusiastically into such lore. The 17th-century English herbalist Nicholas Culpeper said that elm was connected to the planet Saturn and that its leaves could fix broken bones. Modern “healers” promise that drinking a decoction of elm bark can purge phlegm and stop diarrhoea. Haggith cites a present-day “Massachusetts-based herbalist and druid” who claims that slippery elm milk is good for insomnia.
It would be unkind to call this sort of thing merely barking. The author insists that “a western scientific worldview” (in other words, a scientific worldview, shared by scientists in China and India) “is absolutely not the only way forests can be thought about”, which is fair enough. But the fake cures of the “wellness” industry are not without their own ecological downsides: as Haggith writes later, fashionable pseudo-remedies gone viral on TikTok or whatever can inspire the stripping of bark from healthy trees at injurious scale.
Happily, elmwood was not only the preserve of quacks; it was also a sought-after material in shipbuilding (most of the hull of the fast clipper Cutty Sark was made of rock elm), and long before that for making spears and bows: an iron age Celtic tribe was known as “the ones who vanquish by the elm” (Lemovices). Medieval London, Bristol and other cities had running water delivered by mains pipes of elm. And elm is also the source of a famous insult: when the great Samuel Johnson claimed that there was no Gaelic literature, a poet responded with the Gaelic for “your head is made entirely of elm, especially your tongue and your gums”.
Luckily, although Dutch elm disease has killed hundreds of millions of trees since the early 20th century, the species is not lost, or even on the brink of extinction. Brighton, Haggith sees, is managing the blight well through city-wide surveillance and timely surgery. And the fossil record suggests that elms have previously suffered waves of pandemic disease before bouncing back. There will be time for more poetic mentions of elms of the kind the author rather exhaustively collects towards the end. (“Robert Frost was a big fan of elm trees …”)
But the greater part of this book’s devotion, and its delight, is reserved for living specimens in their habitats. Two rows of elms, Haggith notes, can form a “corridor for wildlife, dog walkers and feral children”, or “a church-like nave, an arch-shaped cloister that draws the eye” towards a monastery in Beauly. A cheerfully self-described “tree-hugger”, she is inspired to her best writing by close observation of the trees themselves. On an elm growing horizontally out of the rock near a Scottish loch: “I stand beneath it, neck craned in awe, looking up into the lush green profusion of its living community. It is winter, so all this greenery isn’t the tree’s own leaves, but photosynthesising life using it as a climbing frame”. Elsewhere she finds beauty even in a diseased log, happily noting the “beautiful doily pattern made by the brood-chamber and feeding passages of the grubs”.
And her enthusiasm is contagious. As someone who began this book with literally no idea what an elm looks like, I was inspired to download the Woodland Trust tree-ID app and resolve to pay more attention to our ligneous friends.
• The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees by Mandy Haggith is published by Headline (£22). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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