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. 

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Text and images © Tim Holt-Wilson, 2025

Norfolk Island Pine

There's a Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) sapling on the 6th floor at County Hall, Norwich. 

It is not looking particularly happy, but I'm told it is a lot happier here than in its previous location downstairs in the foyer. A gift to the County Council from a well-wisher, it was given a home by the Environment team last year when a decision was taken to remove all potted plants from the foyer.

I am delighted to make the plant's acquaintance. It is a member of the Araucariaceae, a family of primitive conifers with their evolutionary roots over 200 million years ago, in the late Triassic period. The Araucariaceae once thrived around the globe, including Europe, but since the great extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago, they are only native to the southern hemisphere. Members include the monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana) which makes spectacular forests in Chile, the towering New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) which produces kauri gum, and the extraordinary Wollemia nobilis, a living fossil discovered in a remote Australian ravine in 1994. They are thought to have diverged from a common ancestor in the early Cretaceous period.[1]

The plant has an upright stem covered with pointed, scale-like leaves towards the top and bristling branches that emerge radially. It has an aromatic, resinous smell. I can imagine a small Composognathid dinosaur hiding behind it.

I'd like to have a specimen of A.heterophylla. It is not hardy in the British climate, so it would have to be kept in a plant pot then brought indoors in autumn. However, it is said to be fast growing and can reach a height of over 50 metres. I may have to think twice about the idea!![2]

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[1] - Kunzman, Lutz (2007). Araucariaceae (Pinopsida): Aspects in palaeobiogeography and palaeobiodiversity in the Mesozoic. Zoologischer Anzeiger. 246 (4): 257–77. Online at http://www.thefossilforum.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=364312 [accessed Jan 2018]

[2] - Araucaria heterophylla. Wikipedia. Online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_heterophyllahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_heterophylla [accessed Jan 2018]

Flat field - Ancient oak

22-4-2017

The parish of Bressingham (south Norfolk) is hardly a hilly place, but it does have 'upland' and 'lowland' areas. Its uplands are the gently rolling till plateau north of the A1066 turnpike; its lowlands are the flatlands of the Waveney valley lying south of the road. The one given over to clayland arable farming; the other to pasture and woodland on relict valley fenland.

Prof Tom Williamson (University of East Anglia) gave a walking talk today on the parish's cultural landscape history. The event was hosted by the fledgling Bressingham History Group, courtesy Linda Holly, and was enjoyable and well attended. I contributed a geological dimension to the discussions.

Apart from the congenial company, two features of the walk were outstanding.

Firstly, the view south from Fen Street. A long, narrow field - flat as a runway - leading the eye south towards woods known as Horse Fen and the hidden River Waveney. It looks a suitable pasture for sheep. The BGS map tell us this field is underlain by peat. If so, what we see today are the dried-out and shrinking remnants of the thick mattress of decayed swamp woodland and fen vegetation which has covered this land for most of the last 10,000 years. Our ancestors cut turf here and went wildfowling. According to Faden's map of 1797 it used to be part of Bressingham Fen. Today, drainage has reclaimed much of the the land for farming, and it is a remarkably flat expanse of pasture. It owes its long, thin shape to the historic pattern of 18th and 19th century enclosures in the Fen. This can be seen in the early 19th century tithe map. Four of the old fields have now been knocked into one.

Tithe map [1840s] courtesy Norfolk Heritage Explorer
http://historic-map.norfolk.gov.uk/mapexplorer/ 

Secondly, the view of an immense, ancient oak tree in a clayland meadow at Valley Farm.

The tree has a stalwart trunk and colossal boughs, and is as stag-headed as the horns of Herne. It must be over 500 years old, as Tom suggested. It is truly an ancient, Mediaeval being, worthy of veneration. I wonder when the crown began to die back. Perhaps the field was ploughed for agriculture in one of the World Wars? Nevertheless, I am impressed that the occupants of Valley Farm have come & gone over the centuries without significantly interfering with this extraordinary tree. I am reminded of the celebrated Winfarthing Oak, sited only a few miles away, once the largest in England, which finally died in the 20th century. What makes people preserve such trees rather than fell them for firewood?

Horse Fen field and the Valley Farm oak - the one smooth and the other craggy - are phenomena of the parish; both are products of human cultivation, and both have stories to tell about Norfolk's landscape history.