From The Magazine: One writer’s journey to understand how tree and human have taken such good care of each other all these years.
and Deer Isle. I soon realize that I’m not alone in my interest in the elms. As we walk, one man asks our tour guide about the trees. The guide points to an elm in front of us, and we all tip our heads back to take in its full height. “That is an elm tree that we have photographs of from about 155 years ago, so it’s been around a long time,” he explains.“We were not spared the elm blight,” our guide says. “But we’ve got a long history of trying to save them.”A town elm.
Around the same time that New Yorkers were waking up to discover these elms, an arborist in Ohio discovered Dutch elm disease in a tree there. The elm bark beetle had arrived from the sea, carried in the hull of a ship. Elm wood burls bound for the ports of America and meant to be used as veneer in decorative furniture carried the castaway,.
Tenney holds what is quite possibly the greatest public office ever invented, that of the Castine tree warden. It’s Tenney’s job, along with the elected Tree Committee, to care for the town elms, about 75 of which are actively being treated to stave off Dutch elm disease. As we walk, I can see what appear to be different types of elms. Not the species, but the human intent. Bridal elms flank a door; an 80-foot dooryard elm shades a house.
Dutch elm disease is insidious because it is easily communicable. What made America’s boulevards of elms so majestic, those tunnels of deep green, are the very thing that contributed to their death. The interwoven roots, that underground communion, became carriers of the fungus just as much as the beetles themselves. Elms in the wild, buffered by other species, sometimes fared better, a reminder that nature abhors a monoculture. We do better with diversity.
On my first trip to Castine in 2017, I witnessed the aftermath of just such an elm removal. My friend Robin was giving me a tour of the town that she had made her home after being a lawyer for many years in Manhattan. She and her husband, Chris, a chief mate on a tug and barge boat, moved here shortly after the twin towers fell. Robin’s office had been in the World Financial Center, near the North Tower, and by a miracle, she’d been running late to work that day, something she never did.
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