The elms are remarkable for the massive strength of their trunk and limbs and for the light delicacy of their small branches and twigs as we see them against the sky in winter. The American and English elms particularly are really more beautiful in winter than in summer, when the contrast between the little twigs and the little branches is hidden by the leaves. The elms are all long-lived trees and grow rapidly. They bear transplanting and pruning better than any other tree, and grow on almost any kind of soil. If it were not for the attacks of insects, to which the elms seem peculiarly liable, no trees would be more deserving of cultivation. Perhaps no other tree is so strongly associated in our minds with the beautiful old valley towns and hillside villages of New England, and to the elms they largely owe their beauty. Three indigenous elms are found in the Northeastern States, the American, slippery, and cork elms, and two from Europe, the English and the Scotch or Dutch elms, are planted commonly in our gardens and parks.
American or White Elm Ulmus americana
A large spreading tree, with graceful, drooping branches. Smooth brown twigs; alternate leaf-scars. The terminal and lateral buds are the same size; the flower buds are larger. The flowers come before the leaves in the early spring, and the fruit, a small round samara, ripens later in the spring.
The American elm stands absolutely alone among trees for its especial kind of beauty. No other tree combines such strength and lofty stateliness with so much fine work and delicacy. Its trunk divides a short distance from the ground into many large, spreading branches, which stretch up high into the air and support the waving, drooping, curving twigs and small branches.
AMERICAN ELM, LANCASTER, MASS.
Ulmus americana
(From a photograph by Mr. Eli Forbes)
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It is interesting to find how many distinct shapes the American elm takes. These are so varied that many people think that each form is a separate species, but they are all different types of the same tree. The Etruscan vase is one of the most familiar shapes of this elm. Its trunk divides a short way from the ground into several equally large branches, and the top of the tree is flat, with down-sweeping lateral branches. The beautiful Lancaster elm, from which the accompanying photograph was taken, belongs to this Etruscan vase form. Another well-known shape is the plume, which may be either single or compound. In these trees the single trunk or two or three parallel limbs rise to a great height without branches, and these spread into one or two light waving plumes. Many of these plume elms are found in the Berkshire Hills and throughout New England where the woods have been cut away and the elms have been left standing. The oak form, still another shape the elm occasionally takes, is broad and round-headed, with heavy lateral branches which extend in a horizontal direction in a manner very suggestive of the white oak. This is not so common as the vase and plume elms, and only occurs when the tree has grown in an open situation with plenty of air and light. A fine specimen of this tree stands near the Pratt house, in Concord, Massachusetts. “Feathered” elms are those which have a growth of little twigs along the trunk and branches. They may feather any of the different forms already described, and they come from latent buds which may have been dormant for years before opening.
“The white elm,” Professor Charles S. Sargent says, “is one of the largest and most graceful trees of the Northeastern States and Canada. It is beautiful at all seasons of the year,—when its minute flowers, harbingers of earliest spring, cover the branches; when in summer it rises like a great fountain of dark and brilliant green above its humbler companions of the forest or sweeps with long and graceful boughs the placid waters of some stream flowing through verdant meadows; when autumn delicately tints its leaves; and when winter brings out every detail of the great arching limbs and slender pendulous branches standing out in clear relief against the sky.
“The elm trees which greeted the English colonists as they landed on the shores of New England seemed like old friends from their general resemblance to the elm trees that had stood by their cottages at home; and as the forest gave way to cornfields many elm trees were allowed to escape the axe, and when a home was made a sapling elm taken from the borders of a neighboring swamp was often set to guard the rooftree. These elm trees, remnants of the forest which covered New England when it was first inhabited by white men, or planted during the first century of their occupation, are now dead or rapidly disappearing; they long remained the noblest and most imposing trees of the Northern States, and no others planted by man in North America have equalled the largest of them in beauty and size.”