Elm

July 2025. A hot field with wildflower mix is sweltering in South Suffolk sunshine. The clay-rich topsoil has cracked over the past few weeks of drought. Foraging bees lend a desultory drone. Nearby, an ancient woodland is inviting us out of the heat, but we will need to struggle through fallen twigs, branches, grass tussocks and nettles and beneath its leafy skirts to enter there.

Inside, the vista expands into an ample space of hard trunks and lofty limbs; zones of light and shade; those myriad green flakes we call leaves clustering in aerial mosaic overhead.

The elm tree is very large and correspondingly old - evidently it is a remarkable survivor.  The lofty elms of my childhood have gone; only their clonal regrowth reminds us where they were before the bark beetle finds them and they die off after about 20 years. Their desiccated skeletons rattle in East Anglian hedgerows for a decade or so before rotting away. Meanwhile another generation of suckers is reaching for the sky. This elm is different:  it has inbuilt disease resistance which makes it a desirable variety - potentially a variety with a destiny. 

We are here for look for elm seeds. Emerging into a clearing packed with waist-high bracken and nettles, we can examine the branches of this venerable old tree to find clusters of petalloid seeds on twig tips. There aren't any to speak of - the tree has taken shock at the drought and dumped its children.  They lie like papery, brown farthings underfoot among the leaf litter. I have to pick up and bag handfuls of debris to get enough of them. 

The elm seeds contain an invisible message packed in their DNA.  Once they begin unpacking it, we hope they will grow into disease-resistant Ulmus laevis. With a bit of tree nursery help, we hope to spread them elsewhere in Britain. I will never see them grow great in my lifetime but perhaps a little fiddling labour now sorting through a bag of papery seeds is a gift to an uncertain future which others will enjoy, just as I enjoyed the towering elms of my Suffolk childhood. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Text and images © Tim Holt-Wilson, 2025