On Nov 5, 7:49*am, D. LaCourse wrote:


During the 40s and 50s, I can remember the Springfield, Mass. Park
Department cutting down deseased elm trees. *They pulled up the stumps
and burned the wood/stumps in a land fill about a 1/2 from where I
lived. *Almost all of the elm trees in America were destroyed. *On
occasion I still see one that is healthy, but they are few.

They say that as one ages short term memory turns to **** while, at
the same time, the brain manages to dredge up stuff that was not only
merely forgotten but never made an impresssion at all on
consciousness. Recent events lend credence to this theory. Your
story reminds me that I have occasionally wondered whence cometh my
love of trees. When I was a small boy Dutch Elm Disease was BIG
news.....the sort of thing that would have the talking heads on TV
waxing shrill about all sorts of idiotic nonsense today.....if their
keepers thought anybody at all gave a **** about trees and other such
animals.

I never made the connection before.

I remember seeing big trucks, loaded with enormous spraying apparati,
moving slowly down the streets, sending out hurricane velocity clouds
of atomized poisons (even at that tender age.....well before "Silent
Spring".....I understood that basking such glorious mists was probably
a bad idea) in a futile effort to control this great and deadly
mystery. The elms made cool shady tunnels of what would soon be
exposed as nasty concrete and asphalt deserts. The spraying raised
hopes, and doubtless the average income of what passed for arborists
and sylviculturists in that day, but did little to stem the tide of
destruction. The elms disappeared.

But not all of them. I read somewhere, back about twenty or thirty
years ago, that the disease actually only killed about half of the
American elms in the country.....yeah, "only" half. If true (and I
have no good reason to lean one way or the other on this question) it
would appear that it was predominantly the urban half that got
hammered, because the urban trees did disappear.....mostly. Oddly,
though, as I paid more attention, I began to see more and more
individual lone trees and even some streets and avenues with multiple
ancient (well, relatively so, anyway) trees still lining the streets.
There are still literally thousands of mature and apparently healthy
American elms on the streets of the Milwaukee metropolitan area. And
there are a few here on the tree farm as well. There are more dead
ones than live ones here, but they are mostly recent casualties (morel
bait!), which suggests that the species, while incontestably
diminished and under siege, is in no immediate danger of extinction.
Meanwhile, efforts to find resistant individuals and hybrids have met
with some promising succeses. One can do no more than wish that other
species were so lucky.

Land that we own in Geogia has been denuded of pine trees thanks to the
Pine Bore Beetle. *About 20 years ago there was a terrible drought in
Georgia. *It weakened the pine trees and the beetle got a good start
wrecking its havoc. *We still see dead pines in the area we now live.

Having a plateful of deadly infections close at hand, one hopes that
one can be forgiven for knowing virtually nothing at all about someone
else's plague half a continent away. Not that one lacks
sympathy.....far from it, with a plateful of deadly infections of
one's own.....but one can hardly keep track. In any case, Little's
thesis seems to be valid however much some folks might quibble about
details.

The Asian long horn beetle has devastated hardwood trees in several
towns in Massachusetts. *All the infected trees were on the tree-belt
lining streets in each town. *To stop the spread, each tree was cut
down, its stump removed, and all the wood burned. *It's deja vu all
over again; *sixty years after the elms, these hardwoods are now
disappearing.

Sounds much like the control plan advocated by the U.S. forest service
in the heyday of the chestnut blight.....might as well cut 'em all
down and get something for the bark and lumber before the blight kills
'em and makes 'em all utterly worthless.

Flowering dogwoods, however, seem to be able to get by inspite of the
anthracnose. *We have many on our property in both Massachusetts and
Georgia, and although we have lost one or two in both properties, they
seem to propagate enough to overcome any losses. *The woods hereabout
are literally filled with healthy trees. *Their blooms enchant in the
springtime, while their burgandy colored leaves brighten the most
dismal of autumn weather.

Interesting. Frankly, Little's suggestion that the flowering dogwood
is all but extinct in its native range raised an eyebrow here too, but
I was willing to bow to his presumed greater experience, expertise and
authority, despite having seen a good few trees in bloom in the
southern Appalachians myself within the last decade. I guess the take
home lesson is that a boy needs to be careful about what he accepts on
faith. Nevertheless, the underlying thesis of the book is still
indisputably sound.

Joanne and I took great, if perverted, joy in making torches out of old
broom sticks and strips of rag and ridding trees of tent caterpillars. *
Although the apple, maple and birch trees would survive these pests,
their "tents" were unsightly. *Gypsy mouths have also invaded our
trees, but we found that if we sprayed them with a solution of just a
little dish washing fluid mixed with water in a spray bottle would kill
them without any colateral damage to the trees.

During the short delusional interval when I convinced myself that I
could survive as a chemistry major in college some 25 or so years ago,
I learned that there were, at that time, roughly two million synthetic
organic compounds floating about here and there. Probably a few
trillion by now. A huge segment of the petrochemical industry is
devoted to developing even more, all in the apparently vain hope of
finding something or other that will kill insect pests reliably for
more than a generation or two.....and maybe not kill too much of
everything else around them. In all fairness, I've got to say that
based purely on my own experience they've done a fine job on wasps/
hornets/bees.....hymenoptera in general; they've got some **** out
there that kills them NOW! Everything else seems to be pretty much an
unrelieved and dismal failure. A solution of dish soap in water beats
the hell out of anything else I've tried.....and the bugs have not yet
found an adaptive trick to deal with it. Becky had an infestation of
some sort of caterpillars on a spruce seedling a few years ago. We
tried a variety of commercial pesticides, all of which the worms
appeared to relish. A single squirt of the dish soap from a spray
bottle had them all writhing instantly and stone cold ****in' dead
within a couple of minutes. Just a guess, but I believe what killed
them was not the chemistry of the soap interacting negatively wth
their own body chemistry, but rather the purely mechanical effect of
soapy goo clogging breathing spiracles or something like that. The
nasty little brutes might as well try to evolve an effective means of
dealing with a 12 ounce ball peen hammer.

As you say, "It's a hell of a time to be moving to a tree farm!"

Good luck, and try not to freeze your ass off this winter.

Thanks. I shouldn't have to try real hard. I mean, anybody who
freezes his ass off on an 80 acre woodlot has sort of GOT TO deserve
it.....rght?

Wolfgang