Strange Beauty

A pleasing natural pattern on the heartwood of this dead tree, attractively framed by the lichen-encrusted, peeling bark. Actually, no. This is Dutch Elm Disease - single-handedly responsible for the the biggest transformation of the English landscape in my lifetime. My generation will be just about the last to remember a country in which elm was the predominant tree. Virtually every field, park and wood featured lines of elm trees, creating an enclosed intimacy that has now gone for ever, as the loss of trees of a century old and more has opened up more distant views

Elms occurred in groups, or lines along the hedgerow, because they reproduce as readily by suckering as by seed. So a line of elms in a hedge were often genetic clones of one another, and gave this away by their remarkably similar profile

The timber was used for floorboards and stairs, sometimes even interior doors. More notoriously, it was the default wood for coffins, which might account for its somewhat melancholy reputation as a tree that "hateth man and waiteth". Allegedly, it was inclined to drop dead branches without warning, especially if someone was sheltering beneath it. Kipling worked this into a verse:

Ellum she hateth mankind and waiteth
Till every gust be laid
To drop a limb on the head of him
That anyway trusts her shade

The timber also makes poor firewood, lacking the density to create any real heat. This was captured in another poem, by Lady Celia Congreve, in the 1920s (about the time Dutch Elm Disease was first identified by a scientist from the Netherlands, hence its unjustifiable name, since it actually was introduced from Asia), but the morbid overtone also features:

Elm wood burns like churchyard mould,
E'en the very flames are cold

The picture does not, in fact, show the disease, as such. It shows the remains of the channels created under the bark by the elm bark beetle, a boring (you know what I mean) insect that gains access through cracks or damage in elm's particularly rough and gnarly bark, then burrows through the pith between the heartwood and the the bark. This in itself would not usually kill a tree, but the beetle is also a vector of a fungus that blocks the xylem, the vessels that transport water from the roots to the rest of the tree; the elm dies from dehydration.

There is still plenty of elm in England. Dehydration kills the tree, but not the roots. Elm's ability to grow from suckers ensures that new saplings appear, and these grow healthily until they reach the height at which the beetle normally flies. The tree in this picture reached 5 or 6 metres before it succumbed. There have been attempts to select disease-tolerant strains, with some success, but not enough to roll out a replanting drive. Elm has become, in effect, a common hedgerow shrub, no longer a mighty tree. But it will endure; still it waiteth