DIES FROM WITHIN

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 71, 21 September 1933, Page 6

DIES FROM WITHIN

THE TREACHEROUS ELM

A DANGEROUS TREE

It is a pity that the elm, which is .by far the commonest tree'in the English country-side, is also by far the niost treacherous. But wo may console ourselves with the thought that it is not really British. • Experts in these matters believe that it was first brought and planted here by the Romans.. If so, they left us a baleful legacy, for yelms cause/more deaths than all the other . trees put together, writes Montague Smith in the "Daily Mail." _. The latest example comes from Ashtead, in Surrey, where an elm branch fell on children bathing in a swimming pool and killed.two. * Within recent weeks wo have had the case of an elm branch which fell on people sitting at an open-air cafe in Kensington Gardens, injuring several, and of another which fell'on a Wimbledon tennis queue. The Kensington Gardens elms seem to have a gpecially black record,, for in 1922 one of them fell on a taxicab in the Bayswater Eoad and killed the driver. ,

Another notorious, murderer was an elm at Port Talbot, in Glamorgan, whose falling branches at different times killed two men and acquired foi it the title of "Traitors JElm." Instances of this kind can be multiplied indefinitely. Week by week: there is generally some record of a serious or fatal accident due to tho elm, and it has passed into proverbs as an emblem of treachery. >

.Tall and stately, a group of elms invite us to take shelter under them from rain or sun. Their leaves are > close and shady. Milton wrote of " the shady roof of branching elm, star proof." It is all most seductive on a hot day. . FALSE STURDINESS. But beware! The sturdiest seeming elms are often entirely rotten at heart. The stoutest-looking branch may be nothing but dust at the core. This habit of dying from within makes it unique among our common trees. It: is a sort of whited sepulchre in ; the wrfods. The branch goes on looking Well and dying inside until it can no longer support itself. Not even a puff of wind may be needed to bring it down. Its;hour has come—»nd,let us hopeiwe, are not underneath. .

Elms, moreover, do no,t, strike deep tap roots into the soil like ,the oak and other honest British trees. They are. mere pillars on.,a shallow; platform of roots' which spread laterally often as far as 'the tred is tall, but have no strong grip. In heavy gales, .therefore, they fall like ninepins. , So bad now is the elm's reputation that the Office of Works recently prohibited the planting of any more in London parks, and many landowners are conducting a vigorous felling campaign against them. A mysterious, malady known as Dutch elm disease, which first appeared in Holland in 1919 and has since spread • extensively, in England^ is also demolishing elms wholesale. This looks like just retribution,' but may make the dying elms even .more dangerous while it ravages them.' ,