The Green Snow of May

It was a shock when it first really happened. Early May, and the night had been very windy. I pulled back the curtains and it appeared as if there had been a fair dusting of snow, but only near our house, and what was more, it appeared light green in hue. My half awake brain registered and decoded this unusual phenomenon more sensibly within a few seconds: the row of elm trees that reside in the hedgeline alongside our house had been scattering a few of their almost unnoticeable but intriguing small green seeds for the week or so before, and it appeared that last night’s wind had released the trees of almost all the rest of their entire burden of seeds overnight.

The allusion to a snowfall might seem far-fetched to those, like me, who have never experienced it, but it was a veritable carpet of the stuff. The normally grey drive had disappeared under a sea of green and the recently cleared house gutters were brim full of the seeds. The car had to be cleared off with a scraper before the morning run, and even then, as we drove off, we left a trail of streaming green confetti behind us for the first half mile.

For the following day or two, I revelled in the sight of the stuff, rather like a child seeing a real snowfall for the first time. There was something that seemed so appropriately seasonal about it and it carried with it patterns of beauty that came and went so quickly too. The individual seeds themselves were really pretty, each about the size of a penny, but paper thin, and a marvellous translucent spring green in colour, with a striking little red seed at the centre. When the rains came, the seeds were swept in marvellous patterns down the drive, turning our rough stony track into a complex swirling matrix of channels reminiscent of a great river delta seen from space.

In truth, the phenomenon has continued throughout May, but to a lesser degree; lighter dustings of the stuff, until now at the end of May when only the faint odd seed, now slightly browned, drifts down from the trees on a breezy day. All the while though, it has fascinated me. I am in my late forties and have been out and about in the countryside daily for at least thirty years of that time and yet this is a wholly new experience.

It’s easy to explain the novelty. Elms sizeable enough to shed seed have been rare in the extreme in this country, since the 1970s, thanks to Elm disease; so much so that the first time I remember seeing an large elm tree was in my thirties when visiting Brighton. It took a while for the penny to drop as to what these large trees were, whose shape didn’t quite fit in my fairly ready lexicon of native tree identification. As I went to investigate closer and saw the very familiar leaves on them, I remembered reading how in the vicinity of Brighton a huge effort had been made to cull diseased trees quickly and how a population of mature elms had therefore survived in the area.

The leaves were familiar to me, because despite never having spotted a large elm, the presence of small elm suckers as part of hedgerows has been a common sight. Even more familiar is the sight of stands of ten to fifteen year old elms looking really healthy and promising, then seeing the whole group turn to a row of frazzled skeletons, within a year, as the disease strikes them down again.

So it intrigued me finding the elms here, in our little corner of Carmarthenshire. I had noticed them before the ‘snow’. A visiting friend brought them to my attention soon after we moved in. Roughly two years previous to this year’s ‘elm snow’, she swooped down on a faded brown elm seed on the ground, immediately recognising it (being a little older than me, the seeds were once a common sight to her, whereas they were as strange to me as the large elms had been in Brighton). We looked around and realised that the line of forty foot trees in the nearby hedge were elms.

I was surprised. The trees look maybe thirty or forty years old to me. Had the previous owners of the house been early advocates of trialling some of the supposed disease resistant elm varieties, or had these trees suckered naturally and somehow avoided being infected or re-infected with the elm disease fungus? I had not noticed other elms in the area, but maybe I just hadn’t been looking?

Since then, I have tried to start looking and I had noticed a few candidates, driving around, which I had previously assumed to be other species of tree. I had a mental plan to try investigating on foot, to see if they really were elms.

I hadn’t got around to this, when the ‘green snow’ came and I realised I didn’t have to. Here and there, dotted around, were little ‘drifts’ of that virulent spring green on the ground. It was indeed around most of the ‘elm candidates’ I had noted, but also in quite a few other places where I hadn’t spotted them too. This local landscape does indeed appear to have quite a number of semi- mature elms in it.

I am delighted. I was born just too late to know what the British landscape looked like with elms in so many of its hedgerows. Not having known a landscape full of elms, one would think I wouldn’t miss them, but I do. One only has to look though at photos of the countryside in the fifties, or in fact at almost any landscape painters’ work from the 1700s to the 1970s, to realise what a feature of our rural scene these trees once were.

They are truly fascinating trees too. It astounds me how much seed they produce, yet they apparently only very rarely grow from seed, mainly propagating themselves by ‘suckering’ up form rootstock. A fact which is borne out here by the absence of any elm saplings more than a yard from the hedge with these tall trees in; if they grew from seed in the way sycamores or ash do, then given the snowfall of seeds, the place would be covered in elm saplings.

This propensity to propagate mainly by suckers has also led to a complex diversity of sub types of elm, often specific to the locality they grow in. So much so that taxonomists have involved arguments on how to classify all the various types. Oliver Rackham, the doyen of landscape historians finds their place in the landscape so interesting that he doesn’t place his discussion on them in either the chapter on ‘Woodlands’ or the one on ‘Trees of Hedgerow and Farmland’ in his classic book ‘The History of the Countryside’, but devotes a whole chapter just to elms.

It seems that elms may have disappeared from the landscape before. There was a relatively sudden decline of elm pollen noted in pollen records around 4000BC, so noticeably, in fact, that it is a clearly defined point which helps when using pollen analysis for dating ancient archaeological finds. There was a known recorded decline in the 1800s, though seemingly not as bad as that of the 1970s. Rackham also points to indications that other elm declines might have occurred at other points in European history and suggests that it may be a more cyclical occurrence than we generally perceive it to be now.

Putting aside its place (and periodic absence?) in our landscape as a tree for a moment, its wood is almost as fascinatingly anomalous as the tree is. My first real encounter with its unusual properties was when attempting to work with it as a ‘green’ wood. (This is a traditional type of woodworking, which relies on working the wood within a month or two of felling, largely by splitting and shaving it along the grain, to exploit the weakness of its cross grain strength.)

I was making old fashioned wooden sheep hurdles, and had coppiced some nice looking poles of elm alongside the more normal ash I worked with. I went to split the elm in the same manner as the ash, and found it nearly impossible to split. Any splits one managed to start just fractured out to the side of the wood, instead of running seamlessly down the grain as it would with the ash. Studying this phenomenon in books, I discovered that this was one of the esteemed qualities of elm: its immense cross grain strength.

I was later to see how the virtue of this had been exploited so well by our forbears, when privileged to watch a wheelwright at work, rebuilding the ‘naves’ (or hubs) of a waggon we were restoring. He had acquired four beautiful 18” cube blocks of elm to make these out of. Once these would have been a prized output of a British hedgerow, but with the lack of elms around these days, they were sourced from Eastern Europe.

Having shaped them to a complex truncated cone type shape, he proceeded to mortice out twelve tapered holes in each of these blocks (meaning inevitably several mortices were cut along the grain) and then drive the spokes in with a force that would have rendered most other timbers to matchwood.

The same properties rendered it an excellent wood to make wide boards for coffins, and the same quality, mixed with its unusual characteristic of not rotting when kept continuously wet, meant it found a use in riverside pilings and medieval bridges. I have also seen it in use as the chosen wood for the blades of water mill wheels on several occasions, for similar reasons.

Elm was often used as a general purpose timber in house building too, evidenced in many medieval structures, though curiously Rackham notes that he has never found it to have been used in medieval churches. Once again though, its real forte in this role was its cross grain strength, being the perfect wood for long wide floorboards, as I was to discover for myself.

When we first moved to this old Carmarthenshire farmhouse a couple of years ago, we found we needed to rewire the electrics in the house, which meant lifting some of the upstairs flooring. In one room under the chipboard type panels that appeared to make up the floor, we were surprised to find another floor of old fairly wide (8”) tongue and groove boards. This seemed to be fascinating enough, taking the floor back probably over a hundred years. The real surprise came when the poor electrician found there was yet another layer of flooring under these. This last one consisted of very wide (18”) elm floorboards, which I suspect were put there when the house was built, over two hundred years ago. After the wiring was run, the lifted boards were carefully replaced and are once again hidden away. But I know they are there.

When I stand at the window in the morning, draw the curtains, and look out at the elms in the hedge just coming into leaf, I see the last of the elm seeds fluttering down to the drive.

I wonder if it is fanciful to think that those floorboards were most likely cut from the original elms in this same hedgerow. And if, after all, these current elms have suckered up from the roots of the ones that were there formerly, well then might they not really be essentially part of the same tree which provided the floorboards under my feet?

If the patches of green snow around the local countryside are a sign that the elm has once again shaken off the worst of the current cycle of elm disease and are back, then I for one am thrilled. These trees are truly, in every way, a deep and rich part of our heritage.