Secrets of the Siberian Elm, Conclusion

My doctor had recently told me I was allergic to elms, but Iknew it before then.  Early in the springI would notice the sudden buds on their twigs, bulging like bloodblisters.  On a morning soon after that Iwould wake sneezing, and that would prove to be the morning their buds hadopened into tiny burgundy flowers.  Theywere odd, gritty flowers that seemed to have erupted, rather than bloomed.  A few days later still I would find mywindshield clotted with specks of a substance indistinguishable in color andviscosity from Super Glue.  This stuff isthe blood elms spill as aphids attack them. Such attacks rarely do them any lasting damage.
Nor were those my only grievances.  I remembered that elm roots clog sewers.  I remembered the pale disks of elm fruit thatblew in under the door every May, which resisted the broom and the vacuum withannoying tenacity.  I further reflectedon the dismal scratching sound that sometimes woke me on windy winternights—the reaching branches of the elm, grasping at the furnace vent on theroof. Of course often enough I was awake before the sound, writing or rehearsingmy griefs; maybe the elm only took the blame. In any event, I pruned thoselimbs far back every summer; every winter, they scratched to prove they hadreached the house again.
I resolved to kill the thing, or at least prune it so farback the winter would finish it for me. I went at it with a telescoping pruner and a ladder and a handsaw.  The early work went well; I took off a branchor two every evening, and the patch of lawn where the grass would never growwas suddenly flooded with light.  Thescratching on the roof stopped.  Thegray-brown bark yellowed with oozing sap beneath the wounds I made.
And while I inflicted this gradual violence on my enemy, Iwas falling in love with it.  I wasdiscovering an ecosystem new to me, one that had existed just over my head allmy life.  The roach-hunting wasp was onlymy first discovery in this new world. Another day I came upon a baseball-sized gray nodule.  I assumed it to be merely an aberrant growthin the wood, but when I tried to steady myself against it, it bubbled beneathmy hand, and the air was suddenly full of a smell reminiscent of bad banana anddistant skunk.  It was a mass of squashbugs, the shield-shaped, thumbnail-sized gargoyles I encountered in greatprofusion in my garden every summer.  Ihad always wondered where that foul-smelling congregation went between attackson my garden.  Here they were,camouflaged in the shelter of the elm's bark.
I found the yellow-and-black larvae of the elm leaf beetle,recognizable because their colors matched the adults'. I had seen the adults often enough--theyreigned for a week or so every summer, through profusion rather thanmight.  About the size and shape of asunflower nut-meat, an elm leaf beetle is the feeblest creature imaginable,breaking at any touch.  I find themclotted beneath the windshield wipers on my car, or orbiting the porch light,or littering the skeins of the garden spiders that rest by day in a patch ofmarigolds beneath my kitchen window. Some nights I see the spiders cutting the elm leaf beetles looseuneaten, as if such food were bad for one's cholesterol.
The larvae were soft as bread dough.  I could touch one and find my finger markedwith a sort of yellow nicotine stain—the oily excreta of its accordionskin.  The damage they did to the elm wasastounding: its green curtains of leaves became lacy in the space of threedays.  Even when I climbed the ladder tosearch, it was hard to find an unmolested leaf. Some leaves had been drilled with a few round holes.  Others had been worked along the side, theirnormally serrated edges chewed into a different pattern of serration, thenotches of which matched the span of a larva's mouthparts.  Still other leaves had been reduced to theirpliant green spines.
Yet nothing much came of this assault.  The tree in my backyard transformed itself inanother few days, tossing its tattered leaves to the ground and erupting withthe folded beginnings of new ones.
As my pruning project expanded to fill weeks and thenmonths--I admit I skipped an evening here and a month there--my admiration forthe Siberian elm grew.  The aphids hadhardly slowed it; the elm leaf beetles had proved only a minor inconvenience;my own mutilations had inspired the tree to do a hydra routine, putting out atleast two leaf-laden twigs at the rim of every oozing wound I made.  This toughness explains why a tree murdererfrom the Oklahoma Panhandle should find himself pondering a plant from Siberia.
The Panhandle is notorious for its weather: late freezes;Indian summers that fool plants into suicidal early bloomings; fluctuatinghumidity; temperatures diving forty or fifty Fahrenheit degrees in a few hours;drought; an occasional tornado.  Onespring a single storm deposited four feet of hail on the highway, but knockedonly two old branches and a little greenery off my elm.  The climate is inhospitable to many plantsthat do well elsewhere. That's why people around here brought in a shade treefrom a place with even tougher weather: Siberia.  My forebears promptly named the tree theChinese elm, probably on the theory that all exotic locales to the east may aswell be China.  Confusingly, another treereally is called the Chinese elm, but its flat bark, which flakes off in leprouspatches, is nothing like the furrowed geography of the Siberian species.
Several of the thirty-odd species of elm expanded theirranges in the 1930s because of the Roosevelt administration's ShelterbeltProject, wherein rows of trees were planted to counter erosion.  The Oklahoma Panhandle, the very core of thedust bowl, needed shelter belts, and the hardy Siberian elm was the tree ofchoice.  The reason the Siberiansucceeded where other trees, even other elms, failed, was an aggressive rootsystem.  When much of the topsoil isliterally in the air, only a plant that can drill its own well has a chance.
My own Siberian elm was already in leaf one April when alate blizzard dropped the temperature into the single digits for twonights.  The freeze seemed to demolishevery bit of green on the tree. Afterward, the melting snow was filthy with a dust made of brittle bitsof elm leaf.  A few days after thisapocalypse, the tree was leafing out again. By summer it looked as hardy as it ever had.
I shouldn't give the impression that the Siberian elm isimpervious to harm.  Dutch elm diseaseand other fungal infections attack the species, and so do a broad range ofbacteria, nematode worms, viruses, and even mycoplasms.  The cemetery in my hometown is calledElmhurst.  It is full of Siberian elmsmore than half a century old.  Some arehealthy.  Others bear goiters the size ofhuman heads.  The bark on these diseasedexcrescences snaps off easily in my hand. The naked wood beneath seems made of thick liquid movements now frozen,like the pattern in the surface of hardened fudge.  Tiny spikes of wood protrude here and there.  But these trees have been alive in this deformedcondition, putting out new growth each spring, for decades.
The Siberian elm is tolerant of most herbicides.  It often breathes polluted air  and bathes in acid rain with impunity.  Even the salting of its soil is not a sureway to kill it.  It grows in sunlight orshade, in dry sand or riverbank mud.  Theonly forces that seem to do it real harm are the acts of God: fire and ice,lightning and wind.
The tree in my back yard has beaten me.  I have pruned its limbs as far up as I canreach, and still it thrives.  The cementwalk is littered with disks of elm fruit, cast like coins to a beggar.  At the foot of the tree's trunk stands a newsapling, sprung from old roots.  In acorner of the yard is an amputated limb, as long as I am and thicker than mythigh.  Since I cut it down, its flankshave unfolded a dozen slender sprouts, each now tatted with tender green.

THE BOOK OF DEADLY ANIMALS