Ulmus americana-American elm

$25.00

5 in stock

Category:

Description

American elm is down but definitely not out. It is still pretty common place in wet woods and roadsides of southern Maine. Dutch elm disease certainly dealt it a blow, but when you compare it to the fungal pathogen that utterly nuked American chestnut, it’s clear that this tree is a competitor. Where as chestnut has been tragically reduced to zombie-like stumps with sickly water sprouts, you can easily find mature elms that are reproducing and making a run of it. True, it is nearly impossible to find any LARGE elms anymore, but at least they are surviving to reproductive age; sadly, something that American chestnut cannot do. When you stop and admire an elm that is fully leafed out, you can immediately see how we fell in love with it, why we dragged it out of the woods and lined it along every street in America that could sustain them. Most every town here in New England still has an Elm Street, even though the elms are long gone. They were first replaced with Norway maple (yes, we know how that went) and then white ash (damn you Emerald Ash Borer). Okay, enough with the gloom and doom.

Elm is an important larval host plant to many of our most familiar and spectacular butterflies including the Mourning cloak, Eastern comma, Painted lady, Question mark and Red spotted purple. As I always say in my presentations “there’s a reason why those pretty butterflies are fluttering through your neighborhood”. I recently read that disease resistant elm varieties have more sets of chromosomes than non-resistant plants. This is known as polyploidy and is quite common in the plant world, and is a driver of speciation in kingdom Plantae.

15″-18″ seedlings grown from locally collected seed @ $25 each.