Back to the future
Mark Seddon on plans to halt the demise of the English elm
THEY are, perhaps, some of the best-kept arboreal secrets in England. Huge, mature elm trees, their outline a sudden and thrilling surprise, billowing like thunderclouds above the hedges of a few scattered villages in Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire and East Anglia. In Steeple Gidding and Boxworth, but, above all, in the Cambridgeshire village of Abbots Ripton, the elm, quite remarkably, is still king.
The English elm was, for the most part, wiped out 40 years go by Dutch elm disease, yet, here in Abbots Ripton, there are hundreds of mature, stately elms. Those dusty summer lanes in the heart of England that were half-black shadow, half-tattered sleepy sunlight among the cobwebs, nettles and leafy elm shoots that Gerald Wilkinson mourned in his 1978 Epitaph for the Elm are all around me. It’s as if I’ve become a traveller in time. There are whole rows of huge hedgerow elms, as well as woods thick with leafy, luxuriant examples of all ages.
These remarkable survivors are not, however, English elms—they’re small-leaved elms, sometimes known as East Anglian elms. There are believed to be at least four subspecies, which rather complicates the Latin names attached to them. Ulmus minor appears to be the favourite, but this is likely to spark heated debate among elm buffs.
Wilkinson called them the ‘Cinderellas of the elm-tree population; ignored and neglected: lost causes such as the English love’. Although one or two in Abbots Ripton are showing signs of disease, the vast majority is vibrantly healthy. For some reason, it appears that this species, with a provenance in these islands dating back to the Bronze Age, is more resistant than the poor old English elm, which was brought over by the Romans and has a genetic make-up that doesn’t vary from tree to tree.
Gavin Smith is head gardener at Abbots Ripton Hall and has been working with the local elms since the 1970s. He tells me that 50 or so trees in the local area are due to be felled, but that, in the past couple of years, the usually sterile elm seed is beginning to self-propagate and grow—possibly due to climate change, he believes. ‘Elms tend to spread by suckering, but, now, we’re getting elm seedlings coming up all over the place in the flowerbeds,’ he elaborates. ‘This never used to happen.’
Lord de Ramsey, who owns Abbots Ripton Hall, is the proud owner of what may well be one of the largest surviving collections of elms outside the National Elm Collection in Brighton, East Sussex. He and his family have been heroically looking after the trees for decades and are actively helping to create a new future by giving young saplings to other landowners. Such is their long-term commitment to the elm that they were continuing to inject some of the veteran trees against Dutch elm disease into the early years of this century. Mr Smith says that this practice has since been stopped as it actually distresses some trees and might have led to their susceptibility to disease.
Some scientists believe that the smallleaved elm isn’t as attractive to the elm-bark beetle, which carries the fungal spores that get into the trees and block their waterconducting vessels, thus killing them. The leaves are certainly smoother than the hairy, nettle-like appendages of the English elm, the bark is more knotted and fissured and the twigs more matted in appearance.
The Cambridge geneticist R. H. Richens surveyed elms from more than 500 parishes in eastern England during the 1950s. According to the writer and broadcaster Richard Mabey, this research led to his conclusion that elms were often distinctive to individual parishes and that they had been planted out as suckers for foliage around the settlements and cattle enclosures. These ‘village’ elms spread and survived 4,000 years on.
Over the years, a great deal of energy and expense has been devoted to trying to breed disease-resistant elms or importing species from other countries, but these look completely incongruous once planted in the countryside. It may well be possible to grow a genetically modified and disease-resistant English elm, but it’s surely obvious that, in the small-leaved elm, we have a natural and more or less indigenous tree that could be used to repopulate our hedgerows.
The need for this grows ever more urgent as the ash also begins to disappear. Perhaps this is something for the Woodland Trust, the National Trust and the Forestry Commission to pick up and run with? For now, the elms of Abbots Ripton flourish, surely a cause for wonderment and national celebration.
Small-leaved elms are the “Cinderellas of the elm-tree population”– and vibrantly healthy