The Wonders of Nature

Q: What links harbour buoys, the seats of Windsor chairs, wheel hubs, water pipes, the bottom boards of a lugger, coffins? A: They are all best made of common elm, Ulmus procera, because they all exploit elm’s resistance to splitting and tolerance of saturation with water. Thus if the key structure of a buoy is a ring of elm, it can ride the knocks without splintering and it will remain immune to fungal attack as long as it is not left to dry out at low tide. Or again, the oldest water pipes in the world are made of elm. …

The Elm and the Ash

50 years ago Dutch elm disease pretty well wiped out the common elm in the UK. It was a tragedy. Elm was an emblem of the English landscape, our largest tree and handsome to boot, and its disappearance felt brutal and unsettling, an echo of the social, political and financial unease that gripped England in the late 1970’s I can well remember seeing hedgerows stripped of their elms and the gaping holes left behind. But as is well known, nature abhors a vacuum, and the common Ash, Fraxinus excelsior, was waiting in the wings to exploit a massive opportunity. This …