I still had not learned how to prune the young plane trees at the Metropolitan Museum, but as I plunged into the Neolithic and the long past of coppice and pollard, I began to feel more comfortable with my ignorance. A hundred generations of pruners had had to learn by responding to the trees. I was happy to join them. If you are modest and give the trees a chance to answer, they all counseled, you will be all right.
While I was working on the planes and the lindens, I often took breaks in Central Park, which surrounds the museum on three sides. Although it looks natural, the park is every bit as choreographed as my pollards. I loved walking among the great trees—the huge lindens, the elms, the red oaks, the sycamores—but not a stone’s throw south of the Metropolitan’s façade, I came upon a colony of invaders whose insouciance and insistence dramatically increased my faith in sprouts.
You have to admire invasive plants, whether they are native or from across the seas. They love disturbance, and they flock to it. Give them a nasty soil or a neglected corner, and they are on it like flies on an unwashed dinner plate. But who would think that they could set up shop in the exquisitely designed, produced, and maintained natural forest effects of New York’s Central Park?
I might never even have noticed them, if not for a group of kids. In the middle of a school day, a dozen boys and girls were playing at the bases of elms, beeches, maples, pines, serviceberries, and lindens in the lawn hollow just south of the museum. They were forming, breaking, and re-forming playgroups, as kids do when left to themselves, and discussing important matters like the color of socks and how much a given boy had raised his voice. They gravitated through the big lawn trees to the inside edge of the lawn, where it turned briefly and narrowly to woodland. Their footsteps shushed and sussed in the carpet of fallen leaves. Two knots of kids were gathering piles of bark, lichen, moss, witch-finger twigs, and curled brown leaves. At the bases of trees, they turned their treasures into lean-tos and little rooms. Fairy houses, I thought, unbidden.
Seeing a largish older gentleman approaching her charges, a young teacher with a middle European accent appeared at my side. She politely asked what I thought I was doing. I explained that I love trees and take care of them for a living, and that I was interested in these trees and in how the kids were playing in them. I asked her what they were doing there during a school day.
“This is their forest period,” she said primly.
“Recess?” I asked.
“Not exactly.” She seemed shy to admit that this was an assigned class period, since it was just woodland play.
Suddenly it dawned on me. “Are those fairy houses?”
“Yes,” she replied, and for the first time she smiled.
“Are you from a Waldorf school?”
Her smile widened. “Yes. We are right across the street on Seventy-Ninth Street. The Steiner School.”
We both laughed. It was the fairies that had broken the ice. My mother-in-law, wife, and stepson had each gone to a Waldorf high school. They had heard from their friends who had attended a Steiner elementary school how many and how frequent were the gnomes and fairies who helped them to learn things like grammar and the multiplication tables. Famous among them, for example, was the “Carrying Fairy,” who helped carry over numbers from the ones to the tens to the hundreds columns. When the students got through eighth grade, however, they often ended with the exultant chant “No more gnomes!” Meaning that they had outgrown such things.
These six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds had not. They were delighted with their fairy houses and pleased that playing in the woods was a regular part of their school day. So was I. On the excuse that I wanted to look more closely at the trees, I followed them into the woods, into which by this time all but the most timid had strayed. Their teacher came along, discreetly.
I was about to ask some inane question of an otherwise-occupied young one when I noticed something funny. There were clearly some venerable elms here, each as thick around the middle as a tractor tire. From their slightly mottled bark, not as tightly interwoven as nearby American elms out on the lawn, I guessed these were English elms. I looked at the big notched fruit decaying among the leaves. Right. English. There were also some old Sargent cherries, some underplanted hollies and serviceberries, a bunch of old failing ironwood, and a few struggling crab apples. Standard-issue Central Park trees. But everywhere some stem had fallen, up had popped another tree. There were dozens of them, all slender and sky-reaching among the larger older trees, some as tall as a stop sign, others taller than a four-story brownstone. Some were so close to one another that I could not walk between them. I expected this behavior from Norway maples or from black locust or ailanthus, but from a venerated elm?
I looked at the twigs of these young invaders to confirm what they were. Each had small, sharp-pointed buds, and the one at the end was curved and set at an angle, like the come-hither finger of a Marilyn Monroe. Unquestionably, these volunteers were elms. Not American elms! I thought, Certainly not. I had never seen it happen. But how could it be the English? This species had been widely planted in New York as a park tree, but I would have expected them to be even more polite and decorous than the Americans. I was dead wrong.
Two little girls were standing beside me. “What are you looking at?” one asked. “Yeah what?” the other chimed in. I had been bent over looking for root flares on the smaller elms.
“All these little trees,” I said, and touched three or four of them. I pointed off through the woodland. “All of them, I think, are the children of this big one.”
I was amazed. They were not. “Of course,” said the boldest. “We knew that.” Her friend nodded.
“Well, I think it is wonderful,” I added. “I love it that they have made a home for themselves.”
“So do we.” The friend nodded emphatically, raising her chin up to where her forehead had been and bringing it down to rest on her sternum. The excitement done, they went back to house building.
I kept walking and looking, and I fell in love with these trees, not least because they had frustrated the neatnik park keepers. Grub out an ailanthus? That is fine. But remove the children of the venerable English elm? That would take planning and debate. Or perhaps indeed they had never noticed. If not for the children, I would not have either.
English elm is the most mutable of trees. It is such a master of disguise that it cannot even keep its own name. In every parks department manual, you will find it referred to as Ulmus procera, but in England, where it comes from, the species has been subsumed as a type of Ulmus minor. Easy for them to say, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of types of this species, and indeed, it is a question whether the word species ought to apply to these trees at all. R. H. Richens, the great student of elms in the British Isles, found twenty-seven different village types in Essex alone. Oliver Rackham identified twenty-nine different clones on only forty acres of ground in Essex. Some had hairy leaves, some smooth; some double toothed, some single toothed and some hardly toothed at all; some had long leaf stalks, or short stalks or just a whisper of a stalk; some were tall and slender, some spreading, some low branching and some high; some had bark like lines of Japanese writing, others like the imprint of a circuit board.
The English elm is a champion root sprouter. It gives suckering a good name. In fact, as Rackham noted, it has almost given up sex, preferring to create a clone and then let it spread. Single genetic individuals may spread half a mile or more from their mother. My pipe organ set of tall young elms was every one a root sprout. I had been surprised to find so much English elm fruit in the leaf litter in autumn, since the tree fruits in spring, but few even germinated, never mind created new trees. Looking for the root flares typical of a seedling tree, I found none. Instead, I could almost trace the pattern of the parent tree’s root growth by the spots where new trunks had come up.
Occasionally, however, a sexually produced and genetically distinct seedling does survive. If it prospers, it may become the source of a new, widespreading clone with novel traits. The occasional seedling survivor accounts, over time, for the tremendous variation in shape, size, leaf, and bark, as each new clone makes thousands more like itself. Elms, like the people who have loved and spread them—the leaves are the most nutritious of fodder, along with ash, and have even been used as human food—become endemic each to their own hometown.
Change and clone, seed and sprout, vary and repeat. This remarkable perennial pattern may at least in part explain why Dutch elm disease has not eliminated the English elm. Instead, there are repeated outbreaks. Elms suddenly disappeared from the English landscape during the Neolithic, about five thousand years ago. The disease may have been the reason. People with their new Neolithic axes may have pollarded or coppiced the elms. The pheromones released by the cut stems may have attracted the disease-carrying beetle. Pollen archaeologists have distinguished two more elm declines during the Middle Ages. In the middle and later part of the twentieth century, another outbreak began. The ability of the tree to try out and spread ever distinct varieties may be the secret of its ability to bounce back.
The elm is also matchlessly sneaky. I once had to protect the roots of one growing on a street in Greenwich Village. A new stoop was about to be built, which we needed to guide around the existing roots of the fifty-foot-tall tree. There were at least a dozen major roots spread out under the sidewalk, but we were able to find a way to preserve almost all of them. Whew. A month later, I got a call from the general contractor. “Can you come look at this?”
“Look at what?”
“Well, it’s a root,” he volunteered but would say no more.
When I got there, I saw they had excavated along the entire front wall of the house and down into the basement behind. As I had instructed them, they had wrapped exposed roots in burlap and were keeping them wet. Everything looked just as it should.
“What’s up?” I asked.
The GC pulled the blue tarp off the excavation, and I could see down about 10 feet to the base of the old foundation, which they had removed on the street side. I followed a root that I had thought ended against a retaining wall near the house edge. In fact, it had dived down to the base of the retaining wall, gone under it, reached and passed through the bottom of the stone foundations, and ended up thirty-five feet away, beneath the basement stairs. Why it had gone there, I had no idea, but it must have found some goodies—probably a spring of water. What questing persistence!
The English elm uses its spreading root system to spy out new terrain. In a woodland, the roots spread freely among those of other trees. No new elm rears its head where the other trees are growing. They are lulled into complacency. Then, when a storm removes another tree or part of a tree, light strikes the forest floor. There, the elm root exults, and up comes a root sprout. Before the plants around can even react, the new elm is already established and growing happily, because it is still fed by its mother. This was exactly what had happened among the fairy houses south of the museum. A crab apple declined, an elm came up. A Sargent cherry stem failed, an elm came up. In this way, the English elm can take over an entire landscape. At Ross-on-Wye in England, elms growing in the churchyard finally sprouted and grew up inside the church. Now, that is prayer.
I thought for a moment of the fairy houses. It is our habit to imagine fairies as the little people of mythology, beings who might use toadstools for tables, but the Irish did not always see them so. The Sidhe—pronounced shee—were fairies thought to be about eight feet tall and faintly luminous. Their name means “the gentry.” The slender young elms in the park are certainly tricksters like the fairies, and tall and straight like the Sidhe. They were not exactly luminous, but the children with their offerings of fairy houses made them so for me.