Siberian Elm

What’s growing in the area: Pink and white flowering trees, daffodils, tansy mustard, and dandelions are blooming; four-winged saltbush and blackbush are leafing out; loco and muhly ring grass are greening.
In my yard: Until Saturday’s snow, peach and forsythia were blooming; lilac, cherry, and sand cherry buds were showing color. Siberian pea tree and spirea leaves are opening; caryopteris leaves are forming; first red hot poker, hosta, and coreopsis are up; garden phlox and Rumanian sage have first leaves.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, bougainvillea, coral honeysuckle.
Animal sightings: Brown birds were pecking through seeds that were exposed when I cleaned part of the north bed Sunday; yesterday afternoon, bees buzzed around the peach.
Weather: Snow before sunrise Saturday was gone as soon as the sun appeared; earlier in the week, temperatures ranged from below freezing to low 60's with occasional winds. 13:47 hours of light today.
Weekly update: Now is the season people who hate Siberian elms hate the most. Last year’s seeds are sprouting with roots already longer than the visible stalks, while the newest crop of fertile chartreuse disks is starting to gather in the cracks and corners of the post office.
The tree is detestable enough for its housekeeping habits, but many hate it on philosophical grounds. They go to the river in search of what’s unique about the bosque, and instead this water-hungry, sun lover is what they see. The realities of survival in a drying environment do not meet their images for the desert southwest.
Some scoff at those who introduced the tree, looking on the promotion of Siberian elms during the depression as another government boondoggle. But then, the agriculture department was concerned with the consequences of another confrontation between hopes and realities, between attempts to farm the plains and years of drought that produced the dust bowl. It found descendants of seeds brought from the Peking area in 1914 by Frank Meyers could survive those brutal conditions to slow erosion and put the unemployed to work.

Chuck Dunbar, an Albuquerque blogger, blames their use in the city in the 1950's on an "ecologically ignorant mayor." In those years, my parents planted Chinese elms along the street of their house in an area where the boundary separating the new subdivision from town was the oaks and maples lining streets of established neighborhoods.

At that time, the two species, Ulmus pumila and Ulmus parvifolia, were often confused, and while my mother thinks she ordered the second, she more likely received the first. She knew her trees would grow quickly, but were short-lived. The Chinese tree has stronger wood that’s less likely to crack in ice storms, stays green in winter in warm climates, and is less hardy far north.

When I sold the house some thirty years after she planted her trees, the maples were just filling out, but the elms still stood. Unlike her American elm, they had defied Dutch elm disease. They not only had met her hopes to establish a home that looked like all the others of her childhood in other tree-lined towns, but outlived her.

Of course, one did find the pipe that connected the house to the water main and irritated my father no end. But even he did not have the tree cut down; he simply paid the plumber and replanted the lawn in her memory.

Naturally I’m ambivalent about this reminder of my childhood. I certainly don’t want any tree with weak wood and strong taproots growing near the house or garage. I’ve learned the seedlings are hard to remove, and regenerate when broken off. I’ve had to cut down the same tree for several years before the root finally gave up.

Still, the dark green corduroy leaves are no where near as dangerous as those of maples or catalpas in the fall when they turn yellow. The toothed lances bending inward from central ribs are simply too small to clog eaves and downspouts, won’t suffocate what lies under them in winter, and can’t harbor other pests. They just blow away or disintegrate.

I’m perfectly content to have them in front where little grows since it was grazed decades ago. However, they won’t settle there, for the same reasons they don’t invade the prairie. The seeds prefer disturbed ground, especially along shoulders and outbuildings where extra moisture collects.

When I look at the landscape this time of year, studded with daubs of bright green against dark evergreens and still pale, leafless cottonwoods, I realize how barren this place would be without the brown-anthered flowers. I love the grandeur of the grasslands, but my mother raised me to feel uncomfortable if no trees exist to demarcate civilization. Whatever their faults, these trees do volunteer to live on alkaline soil with salty water in high winds while the preferred fruit trees huddle behind the shelter of stuccoed walls and coyote fences.

Notes:
Dunbar, Chuck. "Bonsai Forest of Siberian Elm," 1 April 2007, available on-line.

Photograph: Siberian elm along the shoulder, 5 April 2008.