Genetic Research Helps a Dream Grow on Elm Street

Elm trees that fit in your hand are growing to spread their limbs over the Main Streets, town squares, state parks and groves left bare when disease felled millions of their towering ancestors.

Since 1983, 250,000 of the new disease-resistant American Liberty elms have been planted in 750 communities in every state except Hawaii and Alaska.

They’ve grown to 40 feet at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn; they’re pushing 25 feet outside the Statehouse in Richmond, Va.; they’re catching hold in state parks throughout South Dakota; they’re helping Jacksonville, Ill., reclaim its nickname of the Elm City; and they’re destined for the courthouse plaza in downtown Prescott, Ariz.

In a new program, they soon could be shading communities along U.S. Route 1 from Maine to Florida.

The elms are grown at the nonprofit Elm Research Institute in a refurbished factory in this small town in southwestern New Hampshire. They are the product of more than 20 years of genetic research to develop a tree to resist Dutch elm disease, which has wiped out as many as 100 million American elms since the 1930s.

By working with trees that survived the onslaught, researchers produced a disease-resistant tree they called the American Liberty elm.

The name memorializes trees planted in Boston a century before the American Revolution. One often served as a rallying point for the Sons of Liberty before British soldiers cut it down when they fled the city in 1775.

The trees are distributed through programs involving Boy Scouts, states, communities, colleges, service groups, golf courses and cemeteries. The goal is to plant 1 million by the turn of the century. About 50,000 are growing in the institute’s “growth chamber,” waiting to be shipped.

“One of the main themes we use is the municipal tree,” said John Hansel, the institute’s executive director. “We want them to be on public property where the public can see them, remember them and carry them into another generation.”

Scouts raise small trees in local nurseries, then plant them in their communities, usually after two to three years of care. Hansel enlisted Scouts as a way to get children involved and keep them involved. He expects children who plant trees to return years later and say, “That’s my elm there.”

About 70 miles north, in Franklin, Eagle Scout Ian Burns planted two elms at the birthplace of Daniel Webster. A photo of the planting, in 1986, is part of the institute’s letterhead.

“My biggest thing when I first started was just to bring back the elm tree to Franklin,” said Burns, who later helped the institute organize Scout programs around the country. “I had no idea it would snowball into as big a deal as it is.”

In South Dakota, 400 small elms were planted last spring to replace trees that once lined state parks.

“One park, Fisher Grove, near Redfield, was known for its towering elm trees,” said park planner Paul Beckwith. “Once those trees were lost, there weren’t any other species that replaced them that gave the same ambience.”

Nationally, the program is setting up regional nurseries for thousands of elms and embarking on an ambitious plan to replant Route 1, the 2,209-mile highway that runs from Maine to Florida and connects what used to be many early Main Streets.

The institute is looking for corporate sponsors to buy 6- to 8-foot American Liberty elms to plant along the route. The first businesses to sign up were in northern Maine.

“I realized the man on the street is going to save the street,” said Hansel, who initiated the elm research while mourning the loss of elms that adorned his boyhood home in New Jersey and the towering trees that died around the home where he later lived in Connecticut.

“It was a wound in our lifestyle,” he said.

At its worst, the blight changed the landscape almost overnight. As diseased trees died, healthy ones were cut down by the millions to try to prevent the spread of the disease.

“It cost us 100 million elms,” Hansel said. “Whole cities were losing their elm populations.”

Losing his trees in Connecticut in 1964 was the last straw, and Hansel decided to find out how to stop it. He brought together researchers, arborists and conservationists and solicited grants and spurred research that led to the surviving elm.

In 13 years, just 20 of 250,000 new trees have been confirmed as lost to Dutch elm disease, bolstering the institute’s confidence that it has indeed developed a disease-resistant tree.

In Washington, the federal Agricultural Research Service and the National Arboretum also have developed two disease-resistant varieties of American elms they call Valley Forge and New Harmony. Both should be available through nurseries in three more years.

As a substitute for American elms, some communities have planted disease-resistant Chinese and Siberian elms.

Meanwhile, Hansel says, a new threat to native elms has emerged. A disease called phloem necrosis, or elm yellow, has been attacking elms in New York state and parts of Pennsylvania. The American Liberty elms are not resistant to that disease.