CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Crusaders Mobilize to Save Sacramento’s Shady Character : The enemy of their prized elm trees is a deadly disease brought into neighborhoods by a tiny beetle.

There are times when the heat is unbearable here, when the brisk march of life slows to a woozy crawl. During those times, the people give thanks to the trees.

Without them, Sacramento would be a pitiful place, just another flat, dreary smudge on California’s dun-colored plain. With them, the locals can survive the broiling days of August--and regale visitors with the dubious boast that their town is second only to Paris in per capita trees.

But all is not well in the urban forest. Its beloved giant--the elm--is in peril, plagued by a beetle that threatens to turn the so-called City of Trees into the City of Stumps.

No bigger than a matchstick tip, the beetle infects its defenseless hosts with Dutch elm disease, a scourge that has decimated tree populations throughout the East and Midwest. If it continues to spread unchecked, the disease could wipe out half of Sacramento’s 25,000 elms in the next 10 years. Already, 122 have succumbed.

“Without the trees, our city would become a heat sink, another version of Bakersfield,” said Marguerite Crouse, an elm-addicted retiree. “Imagine long blocks with the summer sun just pouring in. We’d be exposed, baked.”

Crouse intends to ensure that this dreadful fate does not come to pass. When a state program that combatted Dutch elm disease was abolished last year, she got busy, mobilizing Sacramentans into a unique save-the-elms army.

Their intentions are noble, but their success is by no means assured. Dutch elm disease is a wily old beast, one that has confounded arborists since 1922, leaving 100 million ravaged tree corpses in its wake.

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Dan Pskowski is making his morning rounds, doing a few root inspections and examining some “suspect” elms for wilting or other signs of distress. Pskowski is Sacramento’s municipal arborist. The health of 100,000 city-owned trees rests on his shoulders.

The elms are easy to spot, with girths bigger than a bear hug and towering lime-green crowns that soften the city’s hard edges and bland walls. Aside from its beauty, the elm is a trooper among trees. Hardy, fast-growing and long-lived, it stands up well to the myriad abuses of city life. Cramped growing conditions, pollution, trunk wounds inflicted by careless drivers--nothing fazes the mighty elm.

Because of such traits, the trees were planted abundantly up through the 1920s. Downtown, elms line block after block, their branches often arching to touch over the street. The leafy tunnels are aesthetically striking, but horticulturally hazardous: Dutch elm disease can spread from tree to tree through interwoven roots.

Pskowski has stopped his truck in a glaring patch of sun. “See that blank spot?” he says sadly, pointing to a pathetic strip of brownish grass that marks a break in a long row of cooling elms. “We lost two right there. Without them, the sun just beats right in. The whole picture is changed.”

Dutch elm disease is caused by a fungus carried on the feet of a beetle that burrows beneath a tree’s bark to feed. Once infected, an elm releases a gooey gel, trying to block the fungus’ spread. Instead, the goo merely clogs the tree’s water-conducting vessels. Starved of liquid and nutrients, it dies within months.

First identified in the Netherlands in 1922, the disease made its U.S. debut in 1930, after crossing the sea with shipments of infested European elm logs. As the logs moved by rail from Atlantic ports to inland veneer mills, the fungus spread, eventually killing half the elms in the East and Midwest.

California was spared until 1975, when an ailing tree was found in Sonoma County. Since then, Dutch elm disease has made a steady march south as far as Gilroy, near Monterey. (So far, Southern California has escaped its blight. A single Beverly Hills elm tested positive in 1977, but no additional victims have been found.)

In 1990, Sacramento got hit, and tree deaths have increased exponentially here in the years since. Things are almost certain to get worse; a state program that deployed field crews to detect diseased elms was killed by budget cuts last summer, leaving cash-strapped cities and ill-trained homeowners to cope on their own.

Jesse Rios, a pest specialist with the California Department of Forestry, is not optimistic: “Unless some miracle happens,” he warns, “tree mortality will quickly increase and the disease will spread throughout the state.”

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Across the street from Marguerite Crouse’s home is a park, where a lively basketball game is under way almost every spring afternoon. Sixteen stately elms form a lush fringe around the grassy square. Crouse inspects the 100-foot-tall trees several times each week.

A retired state budget analyst, she has reason to fear the Dutch elm plague. As a child in New Jersey, and later in Wisconsin, she watched as entire forests of urban elms were mowed down after the beetle moved in. “It was devastating,” she recalled. “Elms are such noble, dignified trees. When they go, the place is never the same.”

And so Crouse has launched a crusade to do what most American cities have failed to do--save the elms. In a program reminiscent of the crime-fighting concept of Neighborhood Watch, she is training homeowners to identify at-risk elms so they can be speedily removed before the fungus spreads.

The project also will hire crews--perhaps youths from the California Conservation Corps--to survey trees between May and September, when the beetles are most active. Though the disease can never be eliminated, Crouse hopes losses can be kept to 1% a year.

The major hitch is money. The local utility, recognizing the energy-saving value of trees, has pitched in heartily, and the Sacramento Tree Foundation is helping out as well. But Crouse is still well short of her $150,000-a-year goal.

Another danger is community inertia. Though Sacramentans love their trees, Crouse says, the elms “look so large and dependable, people just assume they will always be there.”

Jean Shaw-Connelly, for one, is already on board. She lives in a neighborhood called Elmhurst, on a boulevard where elms lock limbs to form a dense canopy a mile long. A Presbyterian minister, Shaw-Connelly believes trees are more than an attractive piece of landscape, more than an energy-conserving tool, more than a welcome friend in the heat.

“The trees,” she says, “are a catalyst to form community. In places that have no trees, people stay in their air-conditioned houses. But here, we come out and mingle under this graceful canopy of shade. The trees allow us to get to know one another.”

Dutch elm disease struck Elmhurst in 1992, and two old giants on Shaw-Connelly’s street have already died.

“There is grieving,” she said, “real grieving, when a tree comes down. You know, it’s just like losing a neighbor.”