I’m going to attempt to spare you from my obsessed ramblings today, but I doubt I’ll succeed. I’ve been cleaning up all the debris left from our recently felled elm tree, and it led me to start researching Dutch Elm Disease. You may have read in the past that I’ve been looking to find the perfect trees to plant on our property. I waffled back and forth for over a year on deciding whether or not to plant some weeping willows. I still have some in pots, but they recently bit the dust. I also spent a considerable amount of time looking into hybrid American Chestnut trees but decided they were still too disease-prone to purchase and plant. Now I’m obsessed with Elms.
Here’s what I found out. There are many cultivars of elms; all are American Elms, and one in particular — the Princeton Elm, originally cultivated in the 1920s and selected for its beauty — just happens to be a USDA- and national-parks-approved DED-resistant elm. Over the past few years, they have been planting them on streets again, especially in Washington DC, and only recently are they now available to the public.
These particular elms are not hybrids. They just happen to be resistant to the disease. By resistant, I don’t mean to imply that they can’t get the disease, but these elms have developed a mechanism to block the disease from getting into their root systems, so the trees do not show any effect and do not die from it.
I’ve found a few dealers, one here in Maine and one in MA, that carry the Princeton Elm, and I will purchase a bunch of them in the spring to plant. I don’t think I’ll be waffling on which type of tree to plant anymore. I believe the elm is perfect. It is a beautiful tree, it is native, it is hardy to our Maine temperatures, its root system is not invasive, it is not brittle so it can withstand tough winds, and planting it will help restore this mighty giant back to the forests.
