Mandy Haggith (2025) The Lost Elms. A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees—and the fight to save them.

‘Stand under a tree and exchange breath with it’.

Can you love a tree? Mandy Haggith likes to think so. My track record is mottled. My mates and me attacked trees with knives to practice stabbing. What kind of tree? I’ve no idea. A tree is a tree. We also tried cutting one down with a hand axe. The tree refused to die. We hardly made a dent in it. You don’t of course dent trees.

The Scolytus scolytus beetle is a serial elm tree killer and far handier than us. The fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi, which causes Dutch elm disease, which it carries into the sap, has killed hundreds of millions of trees globally. 25 million in the UK. In the USA around 100 million. The burrowing bark beetle follows the predictable path of trade routes and wood-burning stoves. Global warming makes its job easier and adds fuel to the fire.

Like any virus or infection, constant monitoring is necessary. Beetle traps to check numbers and manually checking the leaves on trees.

Cutting away diseased trees, but the beetles go by the old Western maxim: Better dead than alive. They love dead woods.

Contaminated wood needs to be disposed of. Preferably not in wood-burning stoves. Beetles love the bark of well-stack wood, but not the stoves.

Some people prefer dead trees to trees sprayed by modern chemicals. Whisper it, fungicides and insecticides work.

They are expensive. But less expensive financially and culturally Haggith argues in losing much-loved trees. I must admit I’m more a potato lover. Elms provide cooling shade. Act as a barrier to wind chill. Add to air quality. Make the perfect building material and were our ancestors equivalent of plastic. They were twinned with vines to add support and some shade. Some of the earliest written records from 2 BCE mention them in inventory and Latin poetry. Estimates put their worth as billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

Some councils, like Edinburgh, monitor but push the cost of treatment of trees contaminated with Dutch Elm disease onto punters—don’t  clog the nearest Dutch man or woman. It’s named after those that helped identify it. Other foreigners, mainly English councils, bear the full cost and pass it onto the taxpayer, who’d much rather have the beetles as long as they didn’t arrive in small boats.

America has many liberty trees in which grateful plantation owners liked to hang black slaves. Myth making is part of every country’s tradition.  

‘3 July 1775, General George Washington, aged forty-three, took control of the Continental Army under the shade of the spreading branches of the elm tree on the Common in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Almost exactly one year later, Congress voted for independence of the Thirteen Colonies’.

Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. The Survivor Tree. Conspiracy theorist, Timothy McVeigh, on the morning of 19 April 1995, parked a truck filled with explosives and killed 168 people (including children). The hundred-year-old elm tree somehow survived the blast. But government agents wanted to saw it down to search for evidence of shrapnel.

My favourite story comes from Norse mythology. Three gods walking by the seashore. They find two tree trunks. Odin  breathes into their carved mouths, giving them life.

Vé opens their eyes and ears. Sets their tongues gaggling.  

Vili gifts them intelligence and movement. They shake free of their stumps, flakes of bark falling. And go in search of the bad wee bastard that attacked them with an axe at the side of the gravel park beside Singers’ fitba parks. Read on.