My mission to save the elm

Ophiostoma novo-ulmi is not an expression that sits easily at the head of a Christmas Spectator column, so I’ll return later to the unpleasant fungus and disobliging beetle that over my lifetime have been devastating the English elm, and turn instead to one of our most beloved poets offering his own personal homage to his most beloved tree:

Old Elm that murmured in our chimney top
The sweetest anthem autumn ever made.

John Clare wrote ‘To a Fallen Elm’ in the 1830s: a poem that was partly a lament inspired by his boyhood memories of the English agricultural enclosures.

Thoust heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free
Thoust sheltered hypocrites in many an hour
That when in power would never shelter thee.

Though Clare is raging against the landowner intent on enclosing common land –

With axe at root he felled thee to the ground
And barked of freedom – O I hate that sound

– his rage is a tender, wounded rage, and the old elm beside his boyhood home is more than a political allegory. Clare knew nature. As you rest your aching back after an afternoon pulling the stuff up, read his tribute to ragwort (‘Thou humble flower with tattered leaves/ I love to see thee come & litter gold’). That great elm of his childhood was a real tree:

We felt thy kind protection like a friend
And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire
Enjoying comforts that was never penned.

Picture, then, the poet’s sorrow if he could see the English countryside now, stripped of those majestic, towering cumulus clouds of foliage that were so much part of the English countryside when I was young, visiting from Africa. Since the late 1960s, when the fungus arrived by accident, probably from America, Dutch elm disease has killed, or is killing, almost all our English elms (the commonest variety) as it has cut a swath through their brethren across continental Europe.