Ancient lone elm the Last Ent is ‘guardian’ to new trees
BBC and unknown author
msn.com/BBC
This kind of kool and interesting.
An ancient lone wych elm whose remote Highland location has protected it from Dutch elm disease has been joined by dozens of seedlings for the first time in hundreds of years.
The elm – dubbed the Last Ent of Glen Affric – was Scotland’s Tree of the Year in 2019.
Ents are mythological tree creatures from fantasy writer JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. They were the forest guardians. If you have been watching and listening carefully you would have heard of the Ent called Treebeard.
Lord of the Rings: 5 Weirdest Things About Treebeard & Ents’ Bodies, cbr.com, Blake Hawkins.
Just to be careful I am not accused of poaching, I have included the article above where Treebeard is depicted. Feel free to add more information about Ents and Treebeard, etc.
The 35 seedlings (below) were grown at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and are the “offspring” of wych elms that have survived exposure to the disease for decades in the Scottish Borders.
Why is this (again) a big deal? In the US, Elms died out from Dutch Elm disease which was transmitted by beetles. Similar happened to Ash trees in the US. I lost a nice one in front of my house.
This project is part of a joint effort between the gardens and the University of the Highlands and Islands along with landowners such as Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) to save wych elm from vanishing from Scotland.
FLS forester Sam Brown said: “Having lived hidden away, many miles from the closest tree of the same species, the old elm of Glen Affric has escaped the ravages of Dutch Elm disease. “Using surviving, large wych elms in the Scottish Borders, exposed to Dutch elm disease for around 40 years they are breeding a new generation of seedlings they hope has inherited the resilience to disease from both parents.
“The offspring of these rare, promising trees are being planted in carefully selected sites meeting the Elm’s needs and offer a potential for a natural spread.
“This work is assisting the formation of new populations of wild elms that have the genes and the genetic diversity that we hope will enable survival and adaptation in a changing environment.”
And the tree spawning the seedlings?
Hopefully, the authors allow me to use their article and pictures to show how one variety of Elms may be saved.
Ancient lone elm the Last Ent is ‘guardian’ to new trees, msn.com/BBC
Best of luck to them. Every elm on our property died 20+ years ago. Hope they can save them.
Don:
They used to line the streets in and around Chicago. Tragic loss. These are a different variety which have had exposure to Dutch Elm fungus (Ophiostoma novo-ulmi) and hopefully have a resistance. Always had an interest in trees. To me, this is intriguing.
We suffered similar consequence with Ash trees. The beetle arrived in pallets used for shipments from Asia. The company I worked for was accepting large shipments from its plants in Asia at the time.
@Don,
We had a huge Siberian elm in our back yard in St. Louis for 35 years. They are considered invasive, but we enjoyed its canopy.
Bill
i was very young when i lived in chicago.i think we had elm trees then. But it has been a very long time since i left chicago and i would not have noticed their disappearing. one of the effects of our mobile society (economy): we have no sense of place so we don’t notice what we are losing.
we have ash trees where i live in oregon, but i think they are not the same as the ash trees from which useful things are made…or were made before theGraduate heard “plastics!”
they live in wetlands and don’t seem to live very long, and no one salvages the wood. there are some dead trees waiting the chipper right now where i live. i think i will go out and slice some wood and see what i can make of it.
thing about oregon, it was “ecotopia” when i moved here, though that was not the reason. no one talks about that anymore..
some years ago i was walking with my dogs in what i thought was wilderness. met a couple who yelled at me because my dogs were not on a leash.
Coberly:
If they have an Ash that is dying, the leaves will turn yellow. Peeled the bark off a dead one. If it was attacked by the Emerald Ash borer, you will see paths of it burrowing across the Xylem, a thin capillary tissue just under the bark. Once the beetles cut that tissue by burrowing just under the bark, the tree will die.
Emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) is an invasive, wood-boring beetle that kills ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) by eating the tissues under the bark. Native to northeastern Asia, emerald ash borer (EAB) was first detected in the United States in 2002 and is thought to have been introduced from China via the wood from shipping crates.
I suspect it came on pallets made in China.