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Tree Challenges

In the early 1970s, Dutch elm trees were dying by the thousands from Dutch elm disease, a fungus from elm bark beetles that made its way from Europe to the United States. The American elm had been one of the United States’ fastest-growing trees and was commonplace in many towns. In New England and elsewhere, canopies of elm trees blanketed some of the cities’ most beautiful streets. But the very ubiquity of the trees proved fatal. They were planted very close together, and the trees spread the fungus through their tangled underground roots. The decimation was quick and difficult to contain. The first case of Dutch elm disease reported in the United States was in 1928, and the outbreak in the 1970s and 1980s was horrific. To date, it’s estimated that the disease has killed more than forty million American elms.59

My father honored every tree as sacred. When I was a kid, an elm in our backyard contracted the disease. He sent away for a kit that promised to help, and weeks later a large cardboard box arrived in the mail. It contained what looked like a hundred tubes and other pieces to assemble a Rube Goldberg machine. We drilled holes around the circumference of the base of the trunk of the diseased tree and then inserted clear tubes into it through a pressurized pump in the root-flared system. I was tasked with pumping the fungicide serum into the tree root three times a day. I’m not sure if the tree is alive today, but it definitely lived beyond the time we moved from that home years later. The experience instilled in me an appreciation for trees and a fierce desire to protect them, like my father had.