Ulmus aff. 'Plotii'

Ulmus minor

Ulmus aff. 'Plotii', Bruntsfield Links, Edinburgh, April 2015 (photo: Neil Roger)
Cultivar Ulmus aff. 'Plotii'
Origin England

Ulmus aff. 'Plotii', following Dr Max Coleman's findings about Plot Elm (2000)[1] and his paper on British elms (2002),[2] is the name given to Field Elms in England that resemble but do not completely match the 'type'-tree, U. minor 'Plotii'. Melville's description, at the end of a paragraph on Plot Elm in a 1946 paper, of "a second small-leaved elm, as yet unnamed, found in the lower Thames Valley and East Anglia", that "shares some of the curious features of the Plot Elm but lacks its graceful habit",[3] may be a reference to aff. 'Plotii'.

Description

Elms of the aff. 'Plotii' group "are very close to Plot Elm and have a number of characteristics of the 'type', but their crowns are too broad and regular to match 'true Plot'."[4] They are characterised by some or all of the following diagnostic features: a mature crown of unilateral habit; short shoots that produce more than five leaves in a flush; subequal cordate leaf base; and red club-shaped glandular hairs on leaf surface.

Pests and diseases

... Cedric stopped the car when they were well out of the suburbs on the Hertfordshire side, at a place where a by-road ran up a slope of ploughland. At the top was a short row of elms whose crests were asymmetrical – shaped like one-sided foam on a tankard of beer, as if exposed to a prevailing breeze.

– From E. B. C. Jones, Morning and Cloud (1932).[5]

The trees are susceptible to Dutch elm disease, but as they produce abundant root-suckers immature specimens probably survive in their areas of origin.

Cultivation

The tree was occasionally planted in parks and collections in the UK.

Hybrids

This group of elms is likely to hybridize in the wild both with wych elm and with U. minor.

Notable trees

Westonbirt specimen, before 1913

One of two late 19th-century specimens in Westonbirt Arboretum, mature by 1912 when Augustine Henry photographed it for his Trees of Great Britain & Ireland, was said by Henry John Elwes to be the largest-known tree of its kind in Britain.[6] It was 88 feet high and 8.1 feet in girth in 1921.[7]

Two aff. 'Plotii' survive (2014) in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.[8][9]

A Plot-type elm with leaves that match the diagnostic photographs of the 'type' and (along with flowers and samarae) the illustrations of Stella Ross-Craig,[10] and with characteristic monopodial trunk and inclination in the crown (girth 2.5m), survives (2014) on Whitehouse Loan, Bruntsfield Links, Edinburgh.[11] Since this specimen, which has grown to maturity without apparent pruning or storm-damage, will have been selected by the plantsmen who turned The Meadows and Bruntsfield Links into an elm collection (it stands between Exeters and Huntingdons), it appears to have been planted as an example of Melville's 'species', though not of Druce's 'type'-tree. Its probable date of planting, the mid-20th century, coincides with Melville's paper drawing attention to this peculiar British elm.

References

  1. ↑ Coleman, M., Hollingsworth, M. L. and Hollingsworth, P. M. (2000). "Application of RAPDs to the critical taxonomy of the English endemic elm Ulmus plotii Druce". Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 133 (3): 241–262. doi:10.1111/j.1095-8339.2000.tb01545.x.
  2. ↑ Coleman, Max (2002). "British elms". British Wildlife 13 (6): 390–395.
  3. ↑ Melville, Ronald, 'The British Elms', The New Naturalist, 1946, p.40
  4. ↑ Coleman's description, in correspondence, 2013.
  5. ↑ Jones, E. B. C., Morning and Cloud (1932), p.234
  6. ↑ Elwes, H. J.; Henry, A (1913). The Trees of Great Britain & Ireland 7.
  7. ↑ Jackson, A. Bruce (1927). Catalogue of the Trees & Shrubs [at Westonbirt] in the Collection of the Late Lieut-Col. Sir George Lindsay Holford. London. p. 195.
  8. ↑ "Photographs of supposed U. minor subsp. minor × U. minor var. plotii in RBGE, now described by RBGE as aff. 'Plotii'".
  9. ↑ placestoseeinyourlifetime.com, photo 12
  10. ↑ Richens, R. H. (1983). "7". Elm.
  11. ↑ "aff. Plotii. Bruntsfield Links, Edinburgh".
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