The Elm Review: The Great Lost Tree of England

The elm was one of England’s most beloved trees – until disease swept almost all of them away in a single generation

The Elm holds a hundred and forty-seven reviews and a 4.3 – a solid score on a fair sample – and it is named after one of the most beloved and most tragic of all English trees: the elm, a tree that once defined the English landscape and was then almost entirely wiped out, in a single generation, by disease.

The great English tree

The English elm was, for centuries, one of the defining trees of the lowland English landscape – a tall, stately, magnificent tree, often growing to great size, with a characteristic billowing, cloud-like shape. Elms lined the hedgerows, stood in the fields, framed the villages, and towered over the countryside. They were as much a part of the classic English rural scene as the oak – the great elms in the hedgerow, the rooks nesting in their tops, were a beloved and universal feature of the land.

The elm appears throughout English art and literature as a symbol of the settled, timeless countryside. The painter John Constable filled his landscapes with great elms; poets celebrated them; they were woven into the very image of rural England. For generations, the elm was simply there – vast, permanent, defining, a fixture of the landscape that everyone assumed would always endure.

The catastrophe

And then, in a single generation, they died. From the late 1960s and through the 1970s, a catastrophic epidemic of Dutch elm disease – a fungal infection spread by bark beetles – swept through Britain and killed almost all the mature elms in the country. Tens of millions of trees died. The great elms that had defined the landscape for centuries were destroyed, one after another, in a wave of death that transformed the English countryside almost overnight.

It was one of the greatest and most rapid changes ever to strike the British landscape – the near-total loss of a defining tree species within a decade or two. People who had grown up among the great elms watched them all die. The characteristic elm-shaped skyline of lowland England vanished. A whole feature of the landscape, assumed to be eternal, was simply gone. It remains one of the most poignant environmental losses in British history – the disappearance of a beloved tree that had seemed as permanent as the hills.

The survivors and the memory

The elm has not entirely vanished. Young elms still sprout from old roots and hedgerows, though most die back before reaching maturity as the disease strikes again. A few isolated pockets and a few resistant individuals survive. And the elm lives on, powerfully, in memory and in names – in the countless “Elm” streets, “Elm” houses, and pubs like this one, all named for a tree that many people alive today can still remember towering over the land, but which the young have never seen in its full glory.

To name a place “The Elm” today is, whether intended or not, a small memorial – a name that recalls one of the great trees of England, and one of its greatest natural losses. There is a gentle melancholy in it, a remembrance of the vanished elms of the old landscape.

The bar

A solid, well-regarded bar doing a fair 4.3 across a good sample, named after the elm – the great, beloved, and largely lost tree of the English landscape.

Verdict

Solid, well-regarded, and named after the elm – one of the great trees of England, swept away by disease within a single generation, now living mostly in memory and in names.

Have a drink at the Elm, and remember the great elms that once towered over lowland England – a lost feature of the landscape, memorialised now in a name.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]